MoMA’s annual Kino! film festival is a venue for modern German films to be seen and often receive their premieres in the U.S. This year, I got to see Es kommt der Tag, which is a film exploring karma and its personal and weighty effects on relationships among loved ones. The first twenty minutes side step a lot of clarity in favor of mystery, which is a bit of a mistake given how ultimately familiar the story is. While we have fun speculating on possible political motivations for the terrorist posters and the dossier of information the girl carries reluctantly into the struggling bed & breakfast/vineyard of Judith and Jean-Marc — why is she standing over Judith in the middle of the night, for example — it ultimately becomes clear what connects these disparate people together, and at this point the film loses a bit of its bite and saunters into expected territory (the grandparents stew in pleasantries and are arriving for saturday brunch, how awkward the meal will be!). 
The actresses portraying Judith and the mystery woman, Alice, are both compelling and anchor what could be an interminably long third act with some raw emotion. It’s enough to distract you from the fact that you’ve seen this before, but not enough to be entirely riveting, just because once all the cards are on the table they have so little to work with. The central argument that Alice and Judith spar over is one of guilt – Judith is a former terrorist, and her actions gave Alice an irreparable childhood, so now that terrorist Judith has been discovered 25 years on, with a new unsuspecting family, should she still be forced to pay due diligence? Alice thinks so, and persists – at first terrorizing the family by posting Judith’s wanted poster all over their grape fields, and being an all around menacing presence. But it’s the more emotional appeal to Judith’s family members that cause her to finally confess the truth of the matter – it was an accident, and while she accepts responsibility for the action – it keeps her up at night – she feels as though she is no longer responsible.
The film’s ultimate position is betrayed by the end of the first act, when we discover what is in the little tin. If family is so important to Judith, why does she think there is a time-lapse on personal responsibility, particularly to the family members that you choose to protect. For those that you don’t, well, the title kind of tells you about them, doesn’t it? It’s unfortunate that the film gives Alice a brief view outside of her shell at the end, where she offers a way out for Judith other than the one that we expect. She’s already too much of a deus ex machina, here, persisting and persisting for the sake of it. The actress, Katharina Schüttler, is able to give these scenes where she is earnest (and So Germany, as Judith’s new husband, observes of Alice and his wife) a real gravitas, but even still by the time we’ve heard the argument put out in the same terms over and over again, we kind of feel like throwing out the lamb shank with all those champagne bottles, too.
