The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty

Adapting Peter Handke’s short novel, Wenders delivers a drifter’s-eye view of paranoia and dissociation, shaped by his fascination with the way people move through the world when their inner compass has slipped. Following its titular, murderous protagonist (Arthur Brauss) with dispassionate curiosity, letting behaviour reveal more than psychology, the film’s uncanny calm owes as much to Robby Müller’s sun-bleached, quietly dislocated images as to Handke’s dry, clipped dialogue – a combination that keeps everything slightly off balance, as if it were the world itself that was misfiring.