Four teenagers, one group home, and a summer spent keeping the outside world at bay. Thanks for Nothing is an exuberant, cheeky debut feature about friendship, and about everything a friendship is asked to carry.
Katharina, Ricky, Malou and Victoria share a supported group home, which they have turned into a small anarchic kingdom of their own: dead set against parents, school and every rule going. Their social worker Ballack keeps a loose eye on things, or tries to. It is messy and loud, and for the first time in their lives it feels like home.
Something is wrong with Katharina. She has decided she does not want to reach her eighteenth birthday, and that birthday is two weeks away. Her friends do everything they can to keep it hidden, afraid that the truth will take away the one thing they have: each other, and this house.
That sounds crushingly heavy, and yet this is above all a comedy. Markert tells it with a punk attitude, a notably good soundtrack and a style that never takes itself more seriously than it has to. She breaks the fourth wall, throws in dry asides and stays right up close to her four leads.
The pain is there, but the film never turns it into something romantic. This is not the mysterious, melancholy teenage girl who gets romanticised so often, just four very ordinary girls who refuse to fit in a box.
Beneath the humour runs a thread about institutions that cannot see people as people: child services, the school, the rule that still applies even when it makes no sense at all. But the weight lies elsewhere. With four friends who could not be more different, and who hold onto each other for exactly that reason.
Markert won the award for best debut feature at Raindance for this one. We will not give away any more. Once you have met these four, you will want to know how things turn out for them.
Trigger warning: the film deals centrally with the subject of suicide.
