I Understand Your Displeasure (2026) ‘Berlinale’ Movie Review: Killian Armando Friedrich’s Controlled Debut Takes Aim at Working-Class Precarity

In Kilian Armando Friedrich’s feature debut, “I Understand Your Displeasure” (2026), the spectre of work anxiety finds its most powerful, scalding outlet. With a towering performance from Sabine Thalau as Heike, a customer service manager at a cleaning company, the film is about capitalism misdirecting us into accusations and internal fractures, distracting us from where we should be training our rage and powers to challenge and seek amendments. Friedrich opens with a deadening humdrum texture that the workers’ lives pass through, the numbing experiences Heike must settle into as the status quo.

Heike has imbued the unbending ethos and severe discipline that executives would like all workers to possess. She has honed rigidity into the very fibre of how she approaches work and its underpinning dynamics. While other employees do laugh and enjoy during spare breaks, Heike just keeps pushing forth. The idea of letting her hair down and relaxing seems alien to her. She’s unstinting, her unerring eye entirely fixated on delivering maximum productivity and ensuring no complaints can be lobbed by senior management.

She is driven by the command to achieve efficiency at the workplace. There can be no slacking or being lax with the level of the collective performance. Each must be spotless and leave no room for anyone to take fault. Heike is hyper-focused and doesn’t mind being a killjoy if it’s meddling with work demands. Hence, loneliness also accompanies. It’s the misfortune of being left in a tight corner, where she can turn to no one for her own grievance and anxieties.

“I Understand Your Displeasure” zooms into working-class disaffection, the chasms and splits. Heike wrestles with her tough, churning decisions. She’s cast into a dilemma between being considerate to the employees and superior command. There’s tension and ambiguity she jostles with. It’s a tightrope of humanity she straddles vis-à-vis structures of oppression. To seek refuge is an impossibility. Finding her footing is a precarious ask, pinching her conscience. It’s complicated by her own instinct for self-preservation. The system is designed to divide, create fissures, and cause disunity. Within it, how can she eke out her own spot?

Ethical questions and crises haunt her, insisting she confront even though she’d rather turn away. She has the unenviable job of being the one who has to truncate the bottom tier. This is compounded by the balance she maintains with pressure from above. It lays its bruises on her soul. How much can it chip away at her without leaving her wholly bereft?

Heike has to be wary, cruel, and indifferent to workers’ demands. She must juggle those with her bosses. If she fumbles, the axe will come heavy on her. It’s the kind of work that drains her of sensitivity. She might be listening to the workers, but she always has to calculate in advance. How can she turn the situation into what’s most amenable for the bosses? Rights are squandered and trampled in a bid to keep intact exploitative cycles.

There’s no accountability for the top layer, easily disposing of the bottom grade with casual ease and zero compunction. Heike is foisted as the mediator, the one in charge of the ugly business of carrying out the orders. She, too, has no agency, which dawns only eventually on her. The crushing weight of her realisation ultimately becomes the gateway to an alternative way of working which otherwise would have been shut out of view. Friedrich casts an unflinching gaze at the labour climate, his verite style in sync with the immense emotional and physical toll an adverse ecosystem puts on workers. Friedrich scans the intense strain and conflict low-wage workers are chained to, indignities seen as everyday.

Thalau has a granular hold over her character, stretching to be in firm control. Heike is rigorous and particular in her supervision, going after anyone slightly skidding off centre or lazing. Her turning point arrives when she’s made to stare at her own disposability, that no one in this system is either spared or free of suspicion. “I Understand Your Displeasure” takes that as the kernel of radical breaking away. It’s wrenching but never sentimental, sizing up instead where the objections should pivot to.

Thankfully, there’s no defeatist tone here. Friedrich is aware of the fragility of his characters’ circumstances but endows them with the potential to snap out and be bold nevertheless. Its spirit is empowering and forward-leaning, a welcome relief in a world bent on being dour and consigning the lower social strata to despondency and ruin. It’s a vital light in the dark.

I Understand Your Displeasure premiered at the Berlin Film Festival 2026.

I Understand Your Displeasure (2026) Movie Links: IMDb, MUBI