22 Bahnen (2025) Review: Sisterhood in Tidy Lanes

Is 22 Bahnen worth watching?

It depends on what you want from it: 22 Bahnen is a sincere, well-acted German family drama that gets its two sisters right, but it smooths over material that needed rougher edges. Luna Wedler’s performance and the quiet scenes between the siblings are the reason to watch. The reservation is structural. Flashbacks and swimming-pool symbolism keep explaining feelings the actors have already made clear, and the film rarely surprises anyone who knows the story.

What is 22 Bahnen about?

Tilda (Luna Wedler) is holding several lives together at once. She is finishing a mathematics thesis, working a supermarket checkout and, in practice, raising her ten-year-old sister Ida (Zoë Baier) while shielding her from their alcoholic mother (Laura Tonke). Her only private space is the local pool, where long laps give her the one stretch of the day in which she can think; the German title translates roughly as “22 Lengths”.

The plot turns on an opportunity. A professor offers Tilda a promising doctoral position in Berlin, and the film asks a simple, painful question: can she claim her own future without leaving her sister behind?

22 Bahnen is directed by Mia Maariel Meyer and adapted from Caroline Wahl’s bestselling novel. It is a German-language production from Germany, runs a lean 102 minutes, and also features Jannis Niewöhner in the supporting cast.

The sisters are the film’s best argument

The strongest material in 22 Bahnen is also the simplest: an older sister who is too young to be a parent and a younger one who needs her to be one anyway. Meyer is at her best when she lets these two-handers play without comment, and the film’s warmth comes almost entirely from them.

Wedler carries the film. Tilda is written as a young woman whose competence has become a kind of armour, someone who solves problems because nobody else will, and Wedler lets the tiredness show underneath without turning the character into a martyr. Zoë Baier holds her own opposite a more experienced co-star, which matters, because the Berlin dilemma only works if Ida feels like a real child rather than a plot device.

Laura Tonke has the hardest role and handles it well. An alcoholic parent is easy to play as a villain or a tragedy; Tonke gives the mother enough complexity that the household feels lived in rather than schematic.

When the pool starts explaining itself

The film’s problems come from its tidiness. Meyer stays close to the novel’s structure and tone, which will please readers, but it means the adaptation rarely finds a cinematic idea of its own. The flashbacks meant to deepen the family’s history feel inserted rather than earned, arriving to confirm things the present-day scenes had already suggested.

The swimming pool is the bigger issue. As an image of controlled, counted escape it is apt, and it gives the film a steady rhythm. But the film returns to the metaphor so often, and frames it so neatly, that it starts to underline rather than reveal. The pool as a place of order in a chaotic life is a familiar device in European family drama, and 22 Bahnen does not do enough to make it feel new.

The result is a drama about a messy, frightening home life that is itself rarely messy. It is moving in places, but it seldom makes the audience uncomfortable in the way this material could.

Who should watch 22 Bahnen?

Readers of Caroline Wahl’s novel are the clearest audience; the film is faithful and cast with care. It also suits viewers who like understated, performance-led family drama and want something that can be watched in a single, unhurried evening. Be aware that the story deals with parental alcoholism, neglect and suicide, so it is heavier than its gentle surface suggests.

If you want to go further with German family drama:

• Good Bye, Lenin! also follows a young adult keeping a household together around a fragile mother, with far more comic invention.
• Toni Erdmann sets a daughter’s career against family ties, and is stranger, funnier and riskier.
• Sound of Falling is the formally daring counterpoint, a fractured, multi-generational drama that takes the risks 22 Bahnen avoids.

More titles are gathered in our drama section.

The verdict

22 Bahnen is an honest, carefully acted adaptation with a strong centre in Luna Wedler and the relationship between the two sisters. Its neat structure and overworked pool symbolism keep it from the rawness the story calls for, so it lands as a good watch for fans of the book rather than a discovery for everyone else.

Rating: 3/5