Bagger Drama (2024) ‘San Sebastian’ Movie Review

Piet Baumgartner’s “Bagger Drama” circles a family that is quickly unraveling. It has all the shades of a family drama sans melodrama and high-pitched hysterics. What happens when we refuse to admit and bury the difficult emotions central to any experience of togetherness? We are introduced to a family engaged in the excavator business—everyone chips in, whether one likes it or not. The façade of normalcy shatters with the accidental death of the young daughter in the family, Nadine. The abruptness with which she’s lost casts a long shadow on the family.

The father, Paul, keeps his emotions muffled. The mother still clings to the clothes of her dead daughter. The entire family is coming apart at the seams. Grief and loss intensely hover over the family, but they keep it all bottled up. There’s little space for expression, to vent out all that has been emotionally stifling them. It’s a tragedy none of them, especially the parents, have yet to process. Loss leaks itself into the soul in profound, damaging ways if one doesn’t open up, share, and find a place to heal. Deferred gauging and denial can only lead to the surviving relationships slowly withering away. It’s what happens with the family as distance creeps up between spouses, parents, and children. The family breaks up.

To counter and offset this coldness, the escalating disintegration, a family has to lift itself towards honesty and dialogue. In its absence, the spare pockets of reprieve are doomed to absolute negation. Daniel can barely be frank with his father. That he’s gay, he is compelled to keep it secret. He and Phillip, the guy who his father primes to run the business, have a spark for each other.

Daniel has no reservations about Phillip being the one to take care of his father’s business. He himself has washed his hands off it. He has no aspirations for it, so he chafes at any kind of connection with the traditional family business. It’s not that he entirely severs himself from it. He fulfills primary obligations as he has done for many years. But Daniel refuses to view it as his career destination. We are not told how and when the relationship between Daniel and Phillip bloomed. Still, it is unsurprising to note that this is more of a one-off. It cannot concretize into one with defining finality.

Bagger Drama (2024) ‘San Sebastian’ Movie Review — A still from *Bagger Drama* (2024)

As his father instructs him, their hometown is conservative, and they can’t really go around flaunting their intimacy, so this relationship can’t stay the course. Daniel initially protests this, gradually resigning to the inevitability of his parents’ words. His mother feigns a no-opposition stance but also loudly registers her wistful wish that she would have really liked grandkids. With Nadine gone, the only hope lies with him.

We follow the family for over five years. Departures are held off. Plans are suspended or canceled outright. Any resurrection of happiness fades, and what lingers is a need to completely rearrange. “Bagger Drama” switches in its latter stretches from the son’s dealings to the growing rift between the parents. Baumgartner handles the strife with precision and respectfulness. The receding of the husband from the wife and vice versa, the betrayal and heartbreak of not being understood and seemingly abandoned, accrue pathos and texture.

This is where “Bagger Drama” gathers its emotional depth, exemplified in the firm, moving performances of Bettina Stucky and Phil Hayes. It’s a generous, profoundly understanding drama that doesn’t cut out the harshness but allows its characters to grow and soldier on, even if they must take a rockier road.