5 Movies to Get to Know Project Hail Mary Star, Sandra Hüller — and 3 to Look Out For!

I’m yet to hear Lord or Miller confirm this, but watching Hüller pick up the microphone to sing Harry Styles’ The Sign of the Times in Project Hail Mary certainly looked like a direct homage to another musical number that the actress famously belted out in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, a pitch-perfect German comedy — and yes, such things do exist.

The offbeat story follows Hüller’s career-focused Ines on a work trip to Romania, where her father, an endearingly goofy practical joker, decides to take on an alter ego to get her out of a rut that she doesn’t even know she’s in. The star-is-born moment comes when he eggs her on to sing Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love to a room of unsuspecting colleagues — a scene that famously brought the house down, and got a standing ovation all its own, at the film’s press screening in Cannes. 

In terms of announcing the actress to a wider audience, no film before Project Hail Mary has done more for Hüller’s reputation than Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall — the 2023 Palme d’Or winner in Cannes and a film that went on to receive five nominations at the Academy Awards, including a win for Triet in Original Screenplay alongside nods in Best Picture, Best Director, and, for Hüller herself, Best Actress.

The film is a phenomenally written and relentlessly gripping courtroom drama in which Hüller plays a successful writer who is accused of murdering her less successful husband. The best thing about it is that, IMO, Triet and Hüller never fully confirm whether she did it or not. 

The toughest watch of any film in the Hüller canon is also one of the very best — Birth and Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer’s phenomenal fourth feature, The Zone of Interest.

Based on Martin Amis’s acidic 2014 novel about the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hess, Glazer’s film takes you inside the Hess family household, which was situated just outside the Nazi death camp, to show — less through images than sound — how normal lives are sometimes lived in proximity to the most terrible atrocities imaginable. In Hüller’s hauntingly distant portrayal of Hess’s wife, Hedwig, we also witness the toll that such things can take on a human soul. 

Three years after graduating from Berlin’s School of Dramatic Arts, Hüller got her first big break in Hans-Christian Schmid’s Requiem — in which she gave an otherworldly performance as a character based on Anneliese Michel: a young woman whose epileptic fits were believed by many in her 1970s era Catholic community to be signs of demonic possession.

The film was selected to compete for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, where Hüller went on to win her first Best Actress award (more on the other one shortly). If you want to see where it all began for her, it’s well worth going back and seeking this one out. 

If you happened to catch Franz Regowski in Andrea Arnold’s Bird or Ira Sachs’ Passages recently, you owe it to yourself to see the actor’s weird chemistry with Hüller in this offbeat 2018 film from German director Thomas Stuber.

Titled In the Aisles, it’s the type of film that attempts to channel the whimsy of filmmakers like Michel Gondry and Miranda July, which leaves it feeling a little twee at times — but for the chance to see these modern greats of German cinema together on screen, it is well worth the time! 

Earlier this year, almost 20 years to the day since winning the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Actress for Requiem, Hüller repeated the trick thanks to her incredible performance in  Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, in which she plays a woman and a war veteran who disguises herself as a man 17th-century Germany in order to claim a piece of land. The film is a darkly comic folk tale that lands somewhere between the macabre humour of Radu Jude’s Aferim! and the transcendence of Dreyer’s 1920 classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc. 

Every image looks like it's been painted in charcoal, and even though the actress barely speaks for the opening half, her warmth and humanity eventually, inevitably, shine through. There will be bigger Hüller movies in 2026, but don’t let this one pass you by when it gets a likely release later in the year. 

The next Hüller joint that we expect to premiere in the next few months is 1949 (also known as Fatherland) — a film that, if reports are to be believed, has a good chance of popping up at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Based on Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, a fictional biography of the German writer Thomas Mann, this is Paweł Pawlikowski’s long-awaited follow-up to his Oscar-nominated romantic period film, Cold War — and by the sounds of it, Pawlikowski might be returning to similar thematic waters with his latest. Hanns Zischler stars as Mann with Hüller alongside him as the writer’s wife, Erika. 

Last but certainly not least, we have Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu’s Digger, a movie that looks primed to do for lead actor Tom Cruise what The Whale did for Brendan Fraser and The Wrestler did for Mickey Rourke. 

Little is known about Innaritu’s original story to this point, aside from the fact that Cruise is apparently playing Digger Rockwell — a character who is described on the film’s IMDb page as “the most powerful man in the world” and also, potentially, its only “saviour”. 

Like most Iñárritu films, the cast of this one is absolutely stacked, but Hüller appears to be amongst the top supporting stars — alongside Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed and John Goodman. Does a second Oscar nomination beckon? We will have to wait and see.