Yella

The middle panel of what German critics call Petzold's ghost trilogy, after The State I Am In and Ghosts, and the film that won Nina Hoss the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlinale in 2007. It was their third collaboration and the one that fixed the type she would play for him: composed, watchful, holding something at a distance she cannot name.

Yella leaves the depressed Elbe town where her marriage and her husband's business have both collapsed, and takes a job in Hanover that puts her beside Philipp, a venture-capital negotiator played by Devid Striesow. Petzold shoots the due-diligence meetings as though they were interrogations, and the film's real subject turns out to be the sound of money being discussed in rooms with bad carpet. Hans Fromm's images are cold and clean; the score is used sparingly enough that ambient noise — wind, water, an air-conditioning unit — carries the dread.

Petzold has been open that the film borrows its architecture from Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), and reviewers who spotted this generally admired the transposition: an American B-picture premise rebuilt as a study of post-reunification capitalism. Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars, praising a director who trusts the audience to follow the business deals. It holds 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and remains one of the sharpest films made about what happened to eastern Germany after 1990.