Do you ever think about who tidies your workplace? Who scrubs the toilets? Who takes out the trash? Most people don’t. It’s a thankless business, but also an extraordinarily cutthroat one, at least as evidenced by director Kilian Armando Friedrich’s debut feature, I Understand Your Displeasure. Heike (Sabine Thalau) is the customer service manager of a German-based cleaning company. It’s a position that finds her perpetually bouncing between her boss, her clients, and her staff in an effort to keep the former two satisfied and the latter in line. It’s also a position that forces her to hold personal relationships at arm’s length; she views the cleaning staff not as individuals, but as resources, a means to an end. Their hard work, after all, is only valued when it remains unseen and unnoticed. That tension is thrust to the forefront when a powerful subcontractor threatens to pull out after Heike violated regulations to try to poach one of his workers for her team. It’s a conflict that Heike must provide more workers and hours to resolve, and fire an employee who’s valued by a fellow manager and her best and only friend, Taja (Nada Kosturin).
From I Understand Your Displeasure’s opening shot, Friedrich immerses the viewer in the hectic nature of Heike’s job, and her forceful personality. A handheld camera keeps tight on Heike as it follows her through corridors and rooms, up and down stairs, the woman only pausing briefly to chastise her staff on their performance as they disinfect and mop and take out the trash. It’s a sequence that’s as claustrophobic as it is invigoratingly mobile, the closeness of the camera to Heike essentially placing the audience in her shoes while also communicating how her position grants her little room to breathe. The evidence that she rarely gets a moment to herself continues even after she leaves the workplace; as she drives from location to location, her car rides are punctuated by fraught conversations with unsatisfied clients. Her voice, polite yet firm, conveys the conflicting emotions the film’s title elicits: a desire to please, and the mental strain maintaining such professionalism requires. It’s a feeling that anyone who has ever worked a customer service job in any industry will immediately recognize and understand.
The grounded realism of I Understand Your Displeasure extends to its casting, which leans heavily on non-professional actors Friedrich culled from the cleaning industry. Thalau, who appears in virtually every scene of the movie, ably conveys Heike’s closed-off persona at the beginning, and transitions smoothly, if abruptly (a fault of the script, which forces Heike’s shift in perspective hard and fast in the film’s final half hour), into someone who cares about being a part of a community and is motivated to create actionable change. The plight of low wage workers mired in a system that doesn’t give them the space or ability to grow beyond the position they find themselves in is a through-line that gestures toward Germany’s larger labor issues stemming from Helmut Kohl’s ascension to chancellor of the country in 1982. Mid-way through the film, Taja and Heike acknowledge their (mostly younger) staff’s concerns about working conditions while discouraging them from going on strike, asking them to come in to work regardless. Later, Heike is dissuaded from embarking on a new business venture, the fact that she’s getting older and at age 59, working several more years in her current position would earn her a pension used as justification to keep her in her place. That aspect, along with the issues that arise between Heike and Taja from the intersection of professional relationship and personal friendship, could have stood some further fleshing out (although the latter does lead to some lovely grace notes that work toward humanizing Heike further). But Friedrich’s confident debut, for a film that concentrates on a character whose entire livelihood is built on deflection and mediation, takes an undeniably firm point of view in their favor.
I Understand Your Displeasure had its world premiere at the 2026 Berlinale. Runtime: 93 minutes.
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