Two women, strangers at first, begin to circle around each other in a sleepy East German town of Sangerhausen dominated by a man-made mountain. Ursula (Clara Schwinning), a waitress with a fraying heart, and Neda (Maral Keshavarz), a self-styled Iranian influencer nursing a cast and a visa, each encounter a cryptic figure who may or may not be real.
Their paths converge in a muted ghost hunt through landscapes that are at once natural and constructed, past and present. What emerges is not a fantasy in the usual sense, but a wandering reflection on longing, and fleeting solidarities among those left waiting at history’s margins.
In Phantoms of July, Julian Radlmaier trades in his usual irony for something more subdued, though no less political: a romantic adventure that unfolds not through plot twists, but through spatial digressions, poetic juxtaposition, and the invisible weight of class.
Radlmaier’s early films established him as a formally playful director with a consistent thematic interest in class struggle, absurdity, and the contradictions of political desire. His debut feature, Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, blurred the boundaries between Marxist satire and auto-fiction, while Bloodsuckers embedded its critique of class vampirism within a costume comedy that slyly disguised philosophical theory as farce.
Both films leaned heavily on reflexivity and theatrical gestures, using the artifice of cinema to expose the artifice of ideology. They also cultivated a self-conscious irony, occasionally even breaking the narrative frame to gesture at their own construction.
With Phantoms of July, however, Radlmaier diverges from this template. The irony recedes. The political commentary, while present, is no longer foregrounded in monologue or didactic structure.
Instead, the film draws from the Romantic and surrealist traditions to explore how economic precarity shapes the emotional and imaginative life of its characters. If Bloodsuckers was a Brechtian comedy that used the vampire metaphor to satirize capitalist exploitation, Phantoms of July is a digressive psychogeography that moves through affect, tone, and latent histories embedded in the landscape.
The shift is stylistic as well as structural. Shot by Faraz Fesharaki, the film replaces the crisp, frontal compositions of Bloodsuckers with a looser visual strategy. Radlmeier foregrounds the expressive potential of camera movement, particularly the slow zoom and the panoramic pan, as a way of visualizing yearning and dislocation. The geography of Sangerhausen, a town caught between mining residue and fading romanticism, becomes a narrative device in its own right.
The story unfolds in a deliberately episodic manner, echoing the structure of Radlmeier’s previous films but without the overt intertitles or meta-cinematic ruptures. The film opens with a period-set prologue, vaguely satirical and filtered through the imagined maid of Novalis, which recontextualizes the Romantic symbol of the “blue flower” as a politicized yearning for “another life.” This historical fragment subtly prefigures the disjointed present-day lives of Ursula and Neda, whose trajectories eventually converge not through causality, but through proximity and mutual alienation.
Ursula’s overwork, Neda’s visa woes, and the half-heard nationalist rhetoric playing in the background create a shared condition of vulnerability. What binds the characters is not ethnicity or ideology, but the fragile networks of survival, shared flats, chance meetings, fleeting solidarities. In that sense, the film’s ghost story functions less as genre and more as metaphor, the past lingers not as narrative payoff but as atmosphere, a faint presence just outside the frame.
Radlmeier continues to make use of incongruous elements, but the effect is subtler. Where Bloodsuckers deployed deliberate anachronisms and farce, here the surrealism is folded into the environment. Naked hikers and a camel farm co-exist with understated realism, creating a quiet tension between the absurd and the mundane.
The use of non-professional actors and local participants further anchors the film in its chosen geography. Radlmeier’s method, location scouting before scripting, manifests in a film that feels less like a constructed storytelling and more like a site-specific composition. In this sense, Phantoms of July shares affinities with the psychogeographic mode, where the contours of a place dictate the rhythm and content of the story.
The reduced presence of overt political commentary may invite the interpretation that the film softens its critique. Yet Radlmeier himself has noted that his interest was in placing politics below the surface, allowing it to emerge through texture, situation, and structural absence.
Phantoms of July may mark a stylistic departure for Radlmeier. The ironic detachment of his previous films gives way to a quiet sincerity, one that treats fantasy not as escape but as a mode of political perception.
In this sense, the film retains the essence of his earlier work: an inquiry into how people imagine themselves in relation to power, history, and each other wrapped in soft melancholy and mundane surrealism.