The Perfect Secret

Seven friends gather for dinner. One proposes a game: all phones on the table, every message read out loud, every call on speaker. Everyone agrees, because everyone thinks they have nothing to hide. They are wrong. The subject is not infidelity but what a phone is. What goes on the table is not a device but the second life each of them is separately maintaining, and as the game proceeds it turns out nobody can shut that down completely. The form is a single location: one flat, one table, one evening. The camera does not leave the room and the tension rests entirely on the timing of lines. The source is the 2016 Italian film Perfetti sconosciuti. That film entered the Guinness record as the most remade film in cinema history, with more than twenty versions in different countries. Bora Dağtekin directed this German adaptation, one of the most-watched domestic productions of its year in Germany. Wotan Wilke Möhring, Jessica Schwarz and Jella Haase are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like tense comedy in a single location. Who it is not for: anyone after originality; the film follows its Italian source largely scene by scene.