Drifter

Summary

Drifter follows Moritz, a young man who moves to Berlin with his boyfriend, Jonas, hoping to begin a new life together. When Jonas abruptly leaves him, Moritz is stranded in an unfamiliar city and forced to confront both his loneliness and the uncertainty of who he is outside the relationship. At first, Berlin’s nightlife offers distraction: clubs, sex, drugs, and a succession of intense encounters pull him into a world that is exhilarating but also disorienting. As Moritz becomes immersed in the city’s queer scene, he meets a circle of friends and acquaintances who expose him to a wide range of identities, desires, and approaches to intimacy. These new connections are not presented as a simple path to happiness. Instead, they challenge Moritz’s assumptions about relationships, masculinity, and what it means to belong. Some encounters are liberating, while others reveal the emotional risks of treating self-discovery as another form of escape. The film’s central character remains Moritz, whose journey from abandoned boyfriend to someone capable of forming his own sense of self gives the story its emotional focus. Jonas functions as the absent yet defining figure in Moritz’s early experience, while Moritz’s new queer community becomes a shifting network of guides, mirrors, and provocations. Drifter explores queer identity without reducing it to a single coming-out narrative, examining the tension between freedom and vulnerability, performance and authenticity, and loneliness and connection. Its Berlin is at once a playground and a maze, a place where Moritz can try on different versions of himself before beginning to understand which ones genuinely belong to him.