Film Review

HANNAH

Directed by
Thomas Mehler

Imagine living with a single moment that never leaves you. A single mistake, a single disappearance, echoing across 20 years. That is the prison Lua inhabits in Thomas Mehler’s Hannah.
The film begins deceptively simple: a man, his apartment, his routines. But quickly, ghosts begin to press against the edges. Someone from his past knocks at his door, triggering a flood of memories—Luana’s laughter, the lake, the two minutes that stretched into eternity. Suddenly, Lua is no longer a man in the present; he is a boy again, calling her name, “Luana, stop—it’s not a joke.”

Mehler deliberately avoids traditional flashbacks. Instead, he blurs dream and memory, leaving the audience as disoriented as Lua himself. Why? Because trauma doesn’t play like a movie reel—it fragments, it repeats, it stutters. By refusing neat storytelling, Mehler traps us inside Lua’s fractured memory.
The guilt that Lua carries for two decades is not accidental—it is the heart of the film. Mehler wants us to feel how grief calcifies over time, how silence corrodes, how the weight of “what if” bends a life’s entire shape. Lua is not simply mourning Luana; he is mourning the boy he was, the innocence lost, the path never taken.

When the film reaches its quiet, devastating conclusion, Mehler offers no grand revelation, no absolution. Instead, we witness the first step toward release: recognition. Lua finally names the pain. The guilt remains, but the silence breaks.In this, Hannah is not about solving a mystery—it is about survival. It is about showing how a single wound can shape decades, and how speaking the unspeakable, at last, becomes a form of freedom.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *