In Herk Harvey’s almost unbearably eerie Carnival of Souls (1962), a young woman miraculously survives a watery car wreck. But any relief she might feel after narrowly escaping a near-death experience is quickly upended. She suddenly starts being stalked by a ghoul-faced man it doesn’t seem like anybody else can see whose murky interest in her only makes him more frightening. 

Yella (2007), the third collaboration between German writer-director Christian Petzold and actress Nina Hoss, has the same basic premise as Carnival of Souls. But it doesn’t much feel like a remake, not least because the stalker is not a mysterious wraith but something far easier to confirm: He’s an abusive ex-husband (Hinnerk Schönemann) who refuses to accept that his marriage is over, and he’s the one responsible for the attempted murder-suicide via car crash that he and his estranged title-character wife (Hoss) barely survive. 

Like Harvey, Petzold has made a horror movie about the difficulty of forging a successful future when the darkness of the past continues to creep up — something to which the country in which it’s set can relate — though its touch is so cold and its lead actress so morally slippery that it makes the comparatively nightmare-like Carnival of Souls feel straightforward. (The latter, in turn, makes the throat-catchingly icy Yella feel not like the horror film that it is but, instead, a frosty, intermittently intense drama.)

Nina Hoss in Yella.

Yella was going to restart her life regardless of if she was in the car crash that very nearly derails her new beginning. (She almost but ultimately does not miss the train to the city where the job she’s just landed is.) She’s leaving the small-ish town she’s native to for the much-larger, yet liminally empty in the movie, Hanover, where she’s secured accountant work. Her first day, though, is like a punch to the gut that had already been proverbially bruised by the traumatizing incident she’s just survived. Her supervisor-to-be has been fired, apparently for shady reasons, and, to rub salt into the wound, doesn’t seem to remember hiring her in the first place.

Serendipitously, Yella snags a gig soon after with a businessman, Philipp (Devid Striesow), she meets by chance who looks an awful lot like her continually reappearing ex. His métier turns out to be pretty unsavory — it involves, essentially, milking corner-cutting companies of decently sized percentages of their profits to prevent the exposure of their wrongdoings — but Yella quickly proves cut out for it. She remains breathtakingly cool in meetings where she scrutinizes and then airs out the duplicity of the balance sheets before her; Philipp admits, early on, to underestimating her capacity for snakiness. Her flair for dominating a meeting without so much as raising her voice or overindulging in threatening language is a little frightening. It’s also, after spending most of the film’s first act largely in a state of fragile victimhood, thrilling to see her wrest some control. 

Yella seems to enjoy it, or maybe she doesn’t. The movie wouldn’t have its same understated force without Hoss, a mutedly expressive actress whose inscrutability makes one of the film’s chief (or maybe only) pleasures “trying to read her mind,” Roger Ebert has opined. One roots for her even when she’s playing dirty; her increasing willingness to do as much does not feel like a betrayal as a viewer because Petzold never confirmed her character as having unimpeachable ethics, victimhood less a symptom of higher morals than gendered violence. The expansion on Carnival of Souls’ ideas is, to my eye, more successful than it is to detractors who find it either to be more distracting or not leaned into enough. The mirrored ending, though, is a mistake, not so much undoing the placid effectiveness of what had come before it but feeling a little gimmicky for a movie that had until then been so poker-faced. But I’d rather a movie end than start on the wrong foot.