Former lovers, one-time lovers, current lovers, could-be partners, stage partners, and family: through six vignettes, Berlin-based German actor-filmmaker Fabian Stumm traces the idiosyncrasies of relationships in his third feature, The Ideas. The anthology movie made its bow in the Feature Film Competition of the Zurich Film Festival, following the success of the multi-hyphenate’s Sad Jokes, and cements a filmmaking style tied to his name.

Using his theatre background to execute exactingly performed scenes, Stumm draws many of his actors, both lead and supporting – among them Anne Haug, Marie-Lou Sellem, Ulrica Flach, Romina Küper, Hailey Louise Jones, Anne Haug, Godehard Giese, Anneke Kim Sarnau and himself – from his other two films. At the same time, he introduces well-known German-language thesps – Maren Eggert, Angela Winkler, Hans Löw and Michael Klammer – into his repertory company, if you will.

Working again with his frequent DoP collaborator Michael Bennett, the filmmaker strips away the fluff and returns to his now-usual but effective conceit: simple sets, a focus on the performances, medium shots (some intentionally off-kilter) and colour grading tinted with a grey-blue tone. As a screenwriter, Stumm’s ability to craft naturalistic dialogue-heavy scenes is so sharp that a still camera – which dominates most of the chapters, save for the fifth – is more than enough to transmit emotion on the cinematographic side.

The film’s punchiest, needle drop-esque use of music is the employment of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons’ “Winter” as a married woman (Eggert) goes to meet a younger man with whom she had a summer fling when they were adolescents. Rather than turning the moment into a cliché in light of its extraordinary overuse in cinema, Stumm leans into the drama of the Baroque score’s F-minor ritornello instead of ignoring it altogether. Her calm demeanour belies her anxiety as the camera turns to reveal the man (Stumm), his expression holding back hundreds of thoughts and feelings, before slowing, shifting back to her as the music slows, shifts its pitch down by an octave and ends.

We are plunged in medias res into each story, allowing the character interactions to begin to influence our impressions of them from their first moments on screen. Impressively, even the smaller characters in each chapter feel whole; in fact, it’s the little eccentricities that make these stories so complete. The best example of this may be a family judge who sniffles through the proceedings of a couple’s amicable divorce – but it’s because she has a cold, not because she is sad.

Viewers may have a favourite or a least favourite chapter, but it’s the amalgamation of the six stories in juxtaposition that together offer up the suggestion that compassion, perhaps, is what we forget to both give and receive in our relationships. Stumm plays heavily on our emotional pull towards what-ifs, relying also on not-so-subtle irony – a woman catfishing men on a dating app misses her chance with a sweet guy, and a divorcing couple wonders if their amicable split is normal – to both comedic and gently melancholic ends. Through his theatrically driven filmmaking, Stumm continues to offer a glimpse of the goodness in people, even if it’s bittersweet.

The Ideas is a German production staged by Stumm’s own outfit, Postofilm.