This year’s Berlinale competition, the last one under Dieter Kosslick’s reign, didn’t look terribly promising on paper, and my first dive-in did little to correct that impression. Systemsprenger (System Crasher) by Nora Fingscheidt arrived trailing a script that had already collected numerous awards before a single frame was shot, the kind of pre-emptive laurel-wreathing that ought to make any critic sit up straighter and expect less.

Anyone misled into believing it concerns a nine-year-old hacker breaking into Deutsche Bank to sever its ties with Donald Trump will be disappointed. It is about a nine-year-old girl, though, and a deeply troubled one. Benni is the system crasher of the title, a term used for children who constantly violate the rules of institutional care and simply do not fit anywhere within the German welfare apparatus built, at least nominally, to hold them.

Dardenne, German style

Benni (who despises her given name, Bernadette) leaves chaos in her wake wherever she is deposited. She lashes out violently, and gets ejected from one institution after another, with scary predictability. A childhood trauma involving diapers has left her unable to tolerate anyone touching her face, a detail the film treats with the subtlety of a loaded gun waiting for its third act. Her single aim is reunion with her mother, who is, not unreasonably, terrified of her and wants nothing to do with her. We follow Benni alongside the various social workers, who attempt to help her, chief among them Micha (Albrecht Schuch), whose closeness to his young charge drifts well past what is professionally advisable.

Who is the Systemsprenger?

The film’s clearest strength is Helena Zengel’s performance as Benni. She commits fully to a role that could easily curdle into a checklist of symptoms, and mostly avoids doing so through sheer force of specificity. The rest of the cast holds up its end too, with Gabriela Maria Schmeide particularly memorable as a childcare worker who refuses to give up even as the evidence mounts that she should. The film’s best scene arrives when she finally breaks down after yet another failure, and it is Benni, of all people, who tries to comfort her. It is a small, quiet inversion, and the film is smart enough to let it simply sit there.

It is also, unmistakably, a film assembled with festival juries in mind, hitting its social-issue marks with the confidence of a project that knew, going in, exactly which prizes it was built to win. That calculation does not make the performances any less committed, but it does explain why the film so rarely trusts a scene to simply be what it is, without also functioning as a submission letter.

The cinematography by Yunus Roy Imer offers little beyond realistic colours and drab institutional settings, filmed very much in the Dardenne brothers’ vein, occasionally interrupted, or smashed, by cinematic flourishes rendered in pink, Benni’s colour of choice and the film’s one recurring visual idea. It is a serviceable enough shorthand for a child’s inner life pushing against grey adult systems, but it is deployed so sparingly and so schematically that it reads more as a device than a genuine visual language. The film wants credit for formal daring it has not actually earned.

More damagingly, the film oscillates awkwardly between psychological realism and cheap thrills, unable to settle on which register it trusts more. A late scene involving the nappy trauma mentioned earlier is the clearest example: material that could have opened a genuine window into Benni’s warped interior instead gets cranked up by the director into something closer to horror-movie tension, complete with the attendant score cues and framing. It is a moment that mistakes intensity for insight, and it is not the only one. The film keeps reaching for a jolt when a held gaze would have done more.

Although Systemsprenger is a work that will provoke thought and discussion about a genuinely under-examined corner of child welfare, it does not cohere as a whole, and the repetitive cycles of outburst and institutional failure become numbing well before the credits roll. There is a difference between depicting a cycle and merely repeating it, and the film too often settles for the latter, mistaking accumulation for escalation. I wouldn’t be surprised if Helena Zengel walks away with a Silver Bear regardless, since juries reliably reward performances that do the film’s emotional labour for it. Hopefully she won’t throw it into the crowd, as Benni would have done.

Others were more impressed than I was. Here is a different take on the film