Heldin (2025)

Heldin is the third feature film directed by Swiss screenwriter and filmmaker Petra Volpe. Its title (in the original German) means “female hero.” The name can easily create the expectation that we are about to watch a caped heroine moving through hospital corridors, healing patients one by one. Yet Volpe, in her very first shot, places the viewer not inside a hospital, but inside a production line. This is, of course, a deliberate choice.

Clean nursing uniforms enter the frame from a low angle, flowing past us as if on a conveyor belt. There is no human being yet; no face, no body, no voice. First, there is the uniform. This decision announces the film’s ideological orientation from the outset: the modern healthcare system does not produce individuals, it produces roles. The uniforms are not garments but the material manifestation of a function. The system does not perceive the nurse as a subject, but as a standardized unit. The director’s use of the low angle visually reinforces the domination this order imposes on the individual—the system stands above; the human being remains below.

This opening also serves as a silent diagnosis of the European healthcare system. There are many clean uniforms, yet not enough staff to wear them. The aesthetic of cleanliness and order becomes an ideological surface that conceals structural collapse. For this reason, Heldin begins not with a character but with a mechanism; what we are about to witness is not the story of a person, but what a system does to a person.

Soon, a body enters the production line we have been observing. It is the body of Leonie Benesch, who carries the film in the leading role. It is worth pausing briefly to consider Benesch. The young actress, who has appeared in numerous German television productions—including Babylon Berlin—may have first drawn attention with her performance as Eva in The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke. However, it was with The Teachers’ Lounge, directed by İlker Çatak, that she powerfully demonstrated how decisively a film’s success could rest on her performance. In Heldin, Benesch elevates her presence even further. With her portrayal of Floria, she fully deserves strong applause. Yet unlike Carla Nowak, the body we observe in Floria is not, in the classical sense, a “character body.” She does not openly express her emotions, does not share her inner world, is not constructed as a subject in the familiar sense. She is integrated into the rhythm of the system, becoming one of the machine’s gears.

Floria’s constant movement is not the result of panic but of necessity; she must keep pace with the machine. The camera never idealizes this body, never frames it through a dramatic lens, never elevates it. We see her only while working—bending, walking, rushing to keep up. Thus, the body ceases to function as a human center and becomes an apparatus ensuring the continuity of the system.

The film deliberately distances itself from narratives of individual conscience. Whether Floria is good or bad, whether she performs her job correctly or incorrectly, is not the central concern. What matters is what the body is reduced to within this order. At this point, Max Weber’s concept of rational bureaucracy becomes relevant. According to Weber, within rational bureaucracy the body works, moves, functions—but it is not expected to stop and think. The exhaustion we observe in Floria is not an emotional state but the result of the rigid pressure imposed on the body by the system.

Although set in a hospital, populated with severely ill patients and critical cases, Heldin deliberately suspends the idea of compassion. The film invites the viewer not to identify with the character, but to observe the body. What is portrayed here is not the inner world of an individual, but the domination exercised by an order over the body.

Once Floria’s body enters the mechanism, time in Heldin no longer progresses—it begins to repeat itself. Floria draws blood, inserts IV lines, washes her hands, fills out forms. Draws blood, inserts IV lines, washes her hands, fills out forms. We watch the same actions repeatedly, through similar angles and close-ups, with almost ritualistic attention. The purpose of these repetitions is not to slow the narrative, but to transform the quality of time. What we witness is not a chain of events, but a functioning rhythm: regular, measurable, standardized.

Director Petra Volpe occasionally sprinkles the film with human touches; we see Floria chatting with a lonely patient or giving a child a lollipop. Yet even these intimate moments cannot step outside the order—they remain part of the system. As fatigue and stress gradually intensify, we are presented with the portrait of a healthcare worker who continues relentlessly.

Everything Floria does is correct; the steps are executed flawlessly, procedures fulfilled. Yet this mechanical correctness produces no human closeness. For each repetition erodes meaning. The more an action is repeated, the less personal it becomes. Heldin is precisely about this erosion. The issue is not that a nurse becomes desensitized; it is that the system treats emotion as excess and excludes it.

This merciless cyclical nature of time also explains Floria’s exhaustion. Fatigue is not the result of a single intense moment, but of accumulated repetition. Rather than constructing a dramatic rupture, the film draws the viewer into this accumulation. Burnout thus becomes not a consequence, but the process itself.

The mistake Floria makes in the film emerges from within this very cycle. Heldin does not transform this moment into a dramatic climax; it neither accuses nor exaggerates. The error is not the result of individual carelessness, but the inevitable outcome of repetition, time pressure, and the constant responsibility imposed on the body. Here, the film also deconstructs the heroic narrative: the issue is not what Floria did wrong, but what the system renders impossible for a human being. The mistake appears less as a moral failure and more as a structural fracture.

This aesthetic of repetition quietly establishes the film’s political dimension. What repeats is not only individual action, but the system itself. The same shifts, the same shortages, the same perpetual inability to keep up. Heldin does not attempt to break this cycle; instead, it renders it visible. At a certain point, the viewer realizes: the problem is not what happens in a single night. The problem is that every night resembles the next.

At the beginning and the end of the film, when Floria opens her personal locker, we see numerous thank-you notes. On one level, they seem to represent the human acknowledgment of her work. Yet in fact, they reveal not how meaning accumulates, but how it freezes. Each note should belong to a distinct story; placed side by side, they become indistinguishable—just like Floria’s shifts, added one to another without deepening. The film positions these notes not as emotional rewards, but as by-products of Weberian rational order; even gratitude becomes procedural, loses its personal dimension, and offers no real compensation to the body.

In the final scene, on her way home, Floria leans her shoulder against Bilgin—the patient she could not find time to visit during her overwhelming shift and whom she later learns has died. This gesture is not, in the classical sense, one of mourning or regret. It is less an eruption of conscience than the body’s need, for a brief moment, to rest its unbearable weight against another body. The fact that Bilgin is no longer alive renders the gesture even more striking: solidarity no longer produces reciprocity; it remains a one-sided and belated contact.

The film captures the exhaustion underlying Europe’s radiant promise of welfare. Floria’s endless shift becomes an individual manifestation of the structural crisis of the European—specifically German-centered—healthcare system. There is insufficient staff; patients cannot be adequately attended to; shifts grow longer. One of the film’s strongest qualities is its emotionally restrained approach to these problems. Collapse is not presented as dramatic crisis, but as ordinary condition. For here, collapse is not sudden; it unfolds slowly, regularly, almost invisibly.

For years, Europe took pride in its healthcare system; the welfare state embraced each citizen with equality and security. Yet Heldin demonstrates that the very structure carrying this ideal is now crushed beneath its own weight. The system still functions—yes—but the ethical understanding that once placed the human at the center has given way to manageability and mechanical efficiency. Care continues; the human bond weakens.

Heldin does not romanticize this crisis by heroizing healthcare workers. On the contrary, by rejecting the heroic narrative, it implies this: if a system can survive only through constant sacrifice, it has already collapsed. Sacrifice here is not a virtue, but a structural necessity.

In this sense, the film quietly disrupts the story Europe tells about itself. White corridors, immaculate uniforms, orderly protocols… This entire aesthetic becomes an ideological surface concealing collapse. The political power of Heldin lies precisely here: it does not destroy the system in order to criticize it—it simply shows it as it is. And that is why it is unsettling. For the viewer realizes: this order is not broken; it is problematic precisely in the way it functions.

Floria’s loneliness is therefore not personal but historical. She is not a nurse exhausted in a single night; she is, in the final stage of the welfare state, a female hero still expected to produce “goodness,” though the conditions for doing so have already been taken away—or rather, a body forced into heroism.

Author: Berrin Okçu