The Cold Room 1984

Carla Martin [Amanda Pays] is leaving an English parochial boarding school for the summer to live with her estranged father at an inn in East Berlin. The headmistress, Ursula Howells, a nun, offers Carla a tattered 1936 guide to Berlin and suggests it might prove useful, even as Carla senses that the city and she herself have both changed. Her best friend, Lucy Hornak, Sophie, sends her off with a bag of marijuana, foreshadowing the confusion between childhood and adulthood that will unfold.

Hugh Martin [George Segal] / the teddy-bear-toting father, greets Carla at the Berlin Airport and is amused by how grown-up she appears, even as he underestimates the fragility of the moment. Carla, who is almost seventeen, tries to stride into adulthood with a mix of defiance and fear. They cross the border into East Berlin, and Carla’s nerves flare at the thought of being personally searched because of the items she carries. Hugh is accompanied by his girlfriend, Renée Soutendijk as Lili, who recommends Frau Hoffman’s inn—an odd suggestion that ties Carla’s family history to the city’s turmoil. Carla’s perception of the place shifts as she discovers that the inn holds more than just rooms; it holds secrets and a history that predates her arrival.

In the inn, Elizabeth Spriggs as Frau Hoffman lures Carla with hospitality, while the walls seem to whisper of another era. Carla notices strange flashes in the wardrobe mirror and begins to hear faint tapping from behind a wallpaper seam. When she tears away the wallpaper, she discovers a hidden cold room behind a former butcher shop, where a Jewish dissident named Erich [Anthony Higgins] lies hidden. Carla feeds him in the kitchen and helps him with small comforts—utensils, a razor, and careful secrecy—while she navigates two intertwined timelines: her current life as Carla Martin and the interrupted past as Christa Bruckner, the daughter of the Nazi-affiliated Wilhelm Bruckner [Warren Clarke].

Christa’s world in 1936 is starkly different. She is subjected to the cruelty of her father, who calls her a “little slut” and abuses her, leaving her with self-inflicted wounds along her palms. Christa’s fear and shame drive her to seek a fragile sense of control, including the belief that any child she might bear could belong to Erich rather than Wilhelm. She and Erich carve their names into the wall’s cross, a secret testament to their bond. The inn’s history as a butcher’s shop and its current guise as a hostel blur into one ominous thread that connects Carla’s present to Christa’s past.

Hugh worries Carla is slipping into madness, echoing a fear his own past has planted in him. He arranges for a doctor George Pravda to examine her, hoping to calm her nerves. When the doctor arrives, Carla has stripped the bed of its sheets and is not wearing anything beneath the covers—a signal that something is deeply unsettled. The doctor cannot find a medical cause, and his examination is clinical, noting only inflammation from cleansing, and he concludes that Carla remains virgo intacta. The tension between truth and perception deepens as Carla insists that her father has wronged her the night before.

Christa and Erich’s clandestine affair intensifies, and Christa fears she may be pregnant, a fear she channels into the ritual of engraving their names on the wall beside the cross, with a central I at its heart. The plot thickens when Hugh discovers Christa in the closet-like space, surrounded by rotting food, while Herr Bruckner forces Christa into a bid for control rooted in fear and coercion. Montaglike, the situation escalates as Moltke [Clifford Rose], an inquisitor from the Gestapo, arrives with questions about Christa, a visit that threatens to unleash a web of betrayals.

The tension comes to a head when Erich is killed and Moltke’s men are shot in the clash that follows. Frau Hoffman is unable to hide her shame, and Carla—confused and torn—lurches into action, stabbing her own father [George Segal] in the chest with a hidden knife after a brutal confusion of identities. The ambulance carries them away, and the injuries set the stage for a broader reckoning that will reveal the room behind the wardrobe as a chamber of hidden memories and dark deeds.

When the police finally pry the wardrobe’s wall, they uncover the disused room filled with rats and the long-carved names that Christa and Erich left behind. The revelation exposes Frau Hoffman’s complicity and the inn’s deeper, almost spectral history, forcing Hugh to confront the past he has tried to bury. Carla, now with her arm in a sling, is taken back to the car and then to the airport by Hugh and Lili’s support, where the decision is made to send her back to live with her aunt, away from the tainted echoes of East Berlin.

The final image lingers on the contrast between two timelines—one rooted in a girl’s struggle for autonomy and the other a country’s struggle with its own horrific past. Carla’s journey remains a testament to resilience in a world where memory and reality are tangled like the walls themselves, and the film closes on the echo of a city that has learned to live with its own haunted history.