“My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me” is a comedy about a friendship that gets rearranged by a romance. Marco Petry directed and wrote it. The film runs 98 minutes. Kostja Ullmann plays Olli, David Kross plays Matze, and Janina Uhse plays Rebecca, the woman who upsets the plan.
Olli, Matze and the Trip They Never Take
The setup is simple. Olli and Matze are best friends. They live together, work together, and intend to travel the world together. Then Matze falls for Rebecca, and the life the two men built starts to come apart.
Petry keeps the pieces in place. Ferdinand Hofer is Schmitti, Clara Immel is Hannah, and Mira Huber is Antje. The wider cast fills out the world around the pair.
- Larissa Sirah Herden as Pia
- Anna Herrmann as Moni
- Timon Ballenberger as Hauke
- Thomas Heinze as Dr. Alonso
- Sascha Nathan as Dommel
- Yung Ngo as Jochen
That is a lot of names for a film that belongs to three people. The supporting players are furniture. They arrive, they react, they leave. None of them gets enough room to matter, and the movie does not seem to need them to.
A 98-Minute Comedy That Plays It Safe
The premise has one joke in it: a third person walks into a duo and the duo has to change. Petry tells that joke at feature length without much variation. The comedy stays light, the conflict stays mild, and the resolution arrives where you expect it.
| Beat | Approximate point in the 98-minute runtime |
|---|---|
| Olli and Matze established | First act |
| Rebecca enters | First act |
| The friendship frays | Second act |
| The three reach an understanding | Third act |
Ullmann, Kross and Uhse are the reason to watch. They carry the triangle with ease, and the film is at its best when it lets them sit in a scene rather than rush to the next one.
The problem is what surrounds them. “My Best Friend, His Girlfriend and Me” never finds a second idea. It sets up a clean, workable comedy and then declines to complicate it. Nothing here is bad. Nothing here is surprising either.
This is a film that knows exactly what it is and stops there. For a story about three people whose lives get upended, it plays remarkably safe.
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