A heterosexual couple confronts infidelity and the reality of developing feelings for someone else - a situation that is painful but common in life and cinema. Yet you have rarely seen this circumstance depicted quite like My Wife Cries, the new film by eminent German auteur Angela Schanelec, which premiered in Berlinale’s competition. Unique in its cinematography, performance style and writing, these building blocks of cinema, assembled by Schanelec, fuse into an uncanny anti-realism and anti-naturalism that nevertheless convey transparent emotional truths. Perhaps this notion of construction was very much on the director’s mind, consciously or not: large parts of the film unfold at an elaborate urban construction site.

The presence of French super-producer Saïd Ben Saïd in the credits signals Schanelec’s standing in France, and perhaps an ambition to eventually return to Cannes (where some of her breakthrough work appeared). Yet Berlin is an equally apt setting, given how deeply the film is grounded in the city’s aura and psychogeography. The inciting incident takes place on a highway snaking out of the capital, where kindergarten worker Clara (Agathe Bonitzer, sporting a gamine haircut) has suffered a car accident alongside her dance class partner David, who was not so lucky, and died. Obviously shaken, she calls her husband Thomas (Vladimir Vulević), a crane operator at the aforementioned building site, who rushes to the hospital. Clara relays the news in a manner that is at once oblique and highly articulate, delivered with the poise and duration of a cathartic monologue from classical drama. Deeply affected by her attachment to David and the possibility of intimacy between them, the hulking, stolid Thomas falls to his knees, overcome by a minor panic attack.

Across the film’s svelte 93 minutes, Thomas never quite seems to recover or reconcile himself with this news, and the narrative expands to encompass more of Clara’s social world, along with several other minor characters whose small arcs gently echo the main story. Schanelec alternates long, theatrical dialogue sequences - often captured in elegant master shots with a slight surplus of headroom - with awesomely rendered deep-focus tableaux of the built environment and surrounding landscape. Both the deliberately jarring cuts between these modes and the ambiguous rendering of spatial relations make the moment-to-moment viewing experience at once disorienting and gripping.

In a film conceived as a meditation on language, the power of speech, and the way consciously “written” or contrived dialogue can fracture the assumed naturalism of more conventional cinema, it becomes equally challenging for a reviewer to convey the experience in their own words: you simply have to see, perhaps with a measure of patience and tolerance for its more fey eccentricities (such as a dance sequence set to what must be one of Leonard Cohen’s rare easy-listening numbers). Yet its ultimate message is one of the most precisely articulated in Schanelec’s work, and is all too trenchant and modern: the sad reality that monogamous love might fail us, and that our most passionate, individual feelings might prove uncompatible.

My Wife Cries is a co-production between Germany and France, produced by Blue Monticola Film, SBS Productions, Maier Bros. and Unitbase. International sales are handled by SBS Films International.