Berlinale 2026 Review: FOUR MINUS THREE, Grief Drama Navigates Loss and Mourning Through Clowning

Austrian filmmaker Adrian Goiginger’s latest feature, Four Minus Three, continues his sustained engagement with adaptations drawn from lived experience.

After The Best of All Worlds, based on his own childhood, The Fox, inspired by his great grandfather, and Märzengrund, described as rooted in a true story, Goiginger now turns to Barbara Pachl Eberhart’s autobiographical novel of the same name. The screenplay by Senad Halilbašić adapts her account of losing her husband and two young children in an accident, the grief process and adjusting to life as a widow.

Barbara (Valerie Pachner) and Heli (Robert Stadlober) are partners in life and performance. They raise two children while navigating the practical and artistic demands of clowning. Barbara works as a hospital clown, visiting young patients, while Heli, trained as a street performer, seeks to refine his practice into a more conceptual stage form.

As Barbara becomes the primary earner, Heli assumes childcare responsibilities and develops his material. The script establishes this domestic and professional arrangement efficiently before shifting to the accident that ruptures their lives and anchors the narrative in Barbara’s perspective. She arrives at the hospital to find both children on life support and struggles to maintain composure in anticipation of loss.

The film adopts a nonlinear structure, alternating between the family’s earlier life and the days and months following the accident. The hospital scenes are handled carefully as children are on life support, however the film is openly a grief drama.

Flashbacks function as an origin narrative, tracing the couple’s meeting, their negotiation of artistic ambition and domestic labor, and the role of humor in shaping family life. Moments of marital tension surface around the division of responsibilities and diverging aspirations, not to undermine the relationship but to situate it within recognizable patterns of partnership.

Two narrative strands unfold in parallel, the past informing the present and introducing more background as the film's exposition is dedicated to the accident and its immediate aftermath. The past develops the couple’s shared domestic and artistic dynamic. The present follows Barbara’s attempt to adjust to a radically altered existence.

A recent point of comparison is Czech drama A Year of the Widow by Veronika Lišková, another work based on a true story of bereavement. While Lišková’s protagonist loses her husband and confronts bureaucratic and social transitions over the course of a year, Barbara’s loss encompasses her entire immediate family, producing a different existential register. This distinction becomes explicit when she seeks to return to work under her clown persona, Heidi Appenzeller, and is told by her superior that she is now perceived as a woman who lost her family and not a clown.

Like many stories about bereavement, Four Minus Three traces recognizable stages of grief without overt signposting. In Barbara’s case, the process emerges through emotional oscillation.

She appears detached while organizing the funeral yet delivers an unexpectedly buoyant speech at the ceremony. The event gathers relatives, neighbors, and a large group of clowns. The procession, with performers juggling, breathing fire, and riding unicycles around one large and two small coffins on a cemetery while singing “Ol’ Dan Tucker,” turns into a spectacle usually found in the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Pachner, who also starred in Terence Mallick's A Hidden Life, renders Barbara as a young widow attempting to resume daily life while carrying unresolved sorrow. The performance sustains a tension between moving forward in life and a persistent attachment to memory, particularly of her youngest child, Fini. This tension culminates in a later breakdown that exposes the fragility beneath her composure, which was implicitly present.

Despite its bleak subject matter, the film is stylized as an audience-centered drama designed to be inspirational. After publishing her book, Pachl Eberhart became a grief counselor and later taught literary biographical and journal writing informed by poetry and bibliotherapy.

Goiginger avoids the lacerating viewing experience associated usually with Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier. Instead, he constructs a narrative trajectory that accompanies Barbara through gradual processing toward a gesture of farewell that suggests the possibility of a subsequent chapter.

Pachner carries the film on her shoulders throughout an emotional rollercoaster. Although Four Minus Three touches on several potentially melodramatic moments, Goiginger does not push her performance into excess, and even the scene of emotional breakdown is counterbalanced by the presence of an arrogant television doctor, Friedrich (Hanno Koffler), whose tough love approach enables Barbara to regain a degree of functional stability.

Clowning bookends the film: at the outset, Barbara as Heidi eases children’s hospital stays, while the closing passages foreground the self-therapeutic dimension of performance. With clowning featured throughout the film prominently, Four Minus Three also functions as a tribute to the practice.

The film enjoyed its world premiere at the 2026 Berlinale. Visit their site for more information.