Tom Tykwer's tale of a lovers' triangle, Three

Tykwer’s couple, Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper), are middle-class Berliners - she’s hosts a TV chat show, he runs a company building art objects for conceptual artists – in their 40s whose 20-year relationship has hit a rut. Hanna begins an affair and finds a new passion for life. After a while her partner, suspecting nothing and in personal crisis due to news of testicular cancer and the death of his mother, starts an affair of his own.

The interesting complication is that each, unbeknownst to the other, has taken the same person to be their secret lover – a bio-medicine professor called Adam (played by the ubiquitous Devid Striesow) whom Hanna first met at a conference and Simon by chance met at the swimming pool.

There’s a major barrier to the suspension of belief here in Tykwer’s reliance on outlandish concidence, and his script features too much padding in its first half, but engaging performances, especially from Rois and Striesow, and sly humour go a long way towards off-setting those concerns.

Striesow’s Adam is more of a cipher than a fully-rounded character, though that seems to be deliberate given both lovers clearly don’t really get to know the man in anything other than physical ways.

Rois, whose profile in Germany derives mainly from her large body of TV work, is something of a find for international film-goers – yet another German female with a magnetic screen presence encompassing some impressive acting chops and an unstereotypically appealing look.