Hannes Hirsch’s Drifter (2023, Germany) opens with an act of intimacy that quickly unravels into a quiet devastation: Moritz kneels between his boyfriend Jonas’ legs, only for the moment to fracture into a breakup. “I’m happy you moved in,” Jonas murmurs just before later on during the film, delivering the gut-punch—“I just don’t want a relationship.” It’s a scene that lingers like a bruise, one many queer viewers will recognize—the whiplash of affection dissolving into rejection, often in the same breath. After that, there is not another single intimacy moment or sex scene in the film.

What follows is a raw, neon-soaked odyssey through Berlin’s gay techno underworld, where Moritz—newly untethered—rebuilds himself through kink, chemsex, and precarious connections. He shaves his head, inks his skin, and lets the city’s pulse dictate his rhythm. Yet Hirsch resists easy categorization: Is Moritz truly a drifter, or is he performing drift to belong? When Noah, a tender architect, offers stability (and that elusive shared apartment Jonas refused), Moritz recoils. The film’s genius lies in this tension—its protagonist is both an agent and casualty of his own reinvention.

Visually, Drifter mirrors Moritz’s fractured psyche. The camera lingers on the grit of Berlin’s nightlife—strobe-lit sweat, the mechanical choreography of cruising apps, bodies colliding in clubs where the bass drowns out loneliness. But it’s the quieter moments that devastate: Moritz staring at his reflection mid-shave, or the way Hirsch frames a Grindr hookup like a clinical transaction, all cold light and detached angles.

The film’s power is in its ambiguity. Is this liberation or self-destruction? A search for identity or a trauma response to exile—first from love, then from the conventional life Jonas embodied? Hirsch doesn’t answer, and that’s the point. Drifter isn’t about resolution; it’s about the ache of becoming. By the final frame, Moritz is both more and less himself—a paradox anyone who’s ever tried to outrun their heartbreak will understand.

A piercing study of queer dislocation, Drifter refuses to romanticize its protagonist’s journey. Instead, it asks: What does it cost to remake yourself in a world that only accepts you on its terms? Uncomfortable, essential, and humming with Berlin’s dissonant energy, this is a film that stays under your skin long after the credits roll.

Review written by JP Galvão, a curator and mediator based in Paris, FR.