Synopsis
Philipp, a writer, sets off on a journey through Switzerland with his mother Helene, an alcoholic haunted by a painful family history. Against the backdrop of a fortune tainted by its origins and a past that continues to weigh on the present, mother and son encounter unpredictable situations, navigating memories, conflicts, and attempts to free themselves from the ties that bind them to their family.
Review
3 min read
Reviewed by Fabian
· 17. October 2026
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
With Eurotrash, Frauke Finsterwalder turns a decidedly unsavoury family story into a madcap, grotesque and at times entertaining tragicomedy. The relationship between Philipp and his mother Helene lies at the heart of a journey marked by detours, excesses and situations bordering on the absurd, never settling into the restrained tones of a conventional family drama. The characters’ madness is not merely a comic device; it is also the means through which the film tackles otherwise unbearable subject matter, lightening its weight without entirely neutralising its gravity.
What makes this family particularly hard to stomach is its inheritance. The accumulated wealth, tied to a past compromised by Nazism and the arms industry, represents not merely a fortune to be managed, but a burden to be shed. And it is Helene, even more than her son, who tries to get rid of it, squandering the family fortune in a kind of uncontrolled dissipation. In its apparent absurdity, the gesture seems driven by the need to dispose of a toxicity that is not merely economic, but familial and historical as well.
Philipp, by contrast, seeks escape: he already lives in Nepal, a place despised by his father. Yet distance is not enough to erase one's origins, just as rejection cannot prevent what is rejected from continuing to shape one's life. The father, a horrifying figure at the root of the violence, remains in the background as a presence from which both try to distance themselves, without ever being able to simply expel him from their history.
The title, Eurotrash, broadens the perspective beyond family dysfunction. Europe's trash also lies hidden behind the prosperity, respectability and privilege of a bourgeoisie that has accumulated wealth without being able to fully separate its prosperity from the history that produced it. Switzerland, with its image of order and opulence, becomes the landscape of this contradiction: a pristine surface beneath which traces of a far from innocent past resurface. Finsterwalder does not construct a systematic political argument, but allows the private story to expose the less presentable side of a certain vision of Europe.
The film thus joins a recurring theme running through several films released this year: parents and children bound by an inheritance that does not necessarily reflect who they wish to be. Rather than offering refuge, the family becomes something to break free from, sometimes with the same determination with which one tries to overcome an addiction. Yet Eurotrash avoids turning this conflict into tragedy. Its originality lies precisely in its treatment of such dramatic material through an unstable register, in which the grotesque constantly undermines solemnity and amusement coexists with discomfort.
The lead performances sustain this balance effectively, bringing to life contradictory, unlikeable characters who nonetheless command attention without necessarily inspiring sympathy.
Eurotrash offers neither an exemplary reconciliation nor a definitive liberation. Instead, it follows the disorder of those trying to escape a burdensome inheritance, without quite knowing what to put in its place. Perhaps it is precisely this inability to clean everything up once and for all that gives the film its most distinctive voice: even when we try to throw everything away, something stubbornly remains.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
This movie was in the official competition of Rome Film Fest
