Like a bleaker and more unnerving Toni Erdmann, Marie Kreutzer’s The Ground Beneath My Feet looks at the crippling stress of today’s modern workforce through the POV of Lola Wegenstein (Valerie Pachner), a successful business consultant working in Germany to restructure failing companies. She is devoted to her work, living a mostly solitary existence and keeping her past and personal life hidden, including her mentally unstable sister, Conny, whom she is legally responsible for.

After yet another suicide attempt from Conny, Lola is forced to go back home to Austria to check on her at the psychiatric home where she is once again committed. Conny pleads her sister to take her away, claiming that the hospital staff has been abusing her, but Lola shrugs it off as a typical symptom of her paranoid schizophrenic delusions and returns to work in Germany. But when Lola starts receiving frantic letters and calls from her sister that she couldn’t possibly be making, the stress of balancing this new dilemma with her everyday workload gradually allows her own sense of reality to become blurred and shaky.

The question of whether Lola’s increasingly fractured mental state is a result of her succumbing to her family’s history of schizophrenic tendencies or just due to burning out on the job is the central question and Kreutzer probes it slowly and deliberately, staunchly refusing to come down on either side. While also involved in a complicated sexual relationship with her boss, Elise, Lola starts to distrust her colleagues, believing she’s being cut out of the current project that she’s put all of her energy into. Since we’re locked right into her perspective, we don’t really know what to believe either.

The result is a gripping psychothriller and socially urgent character study all at the same time.