Anja Marquardt is drawn to professional intimacy and the ways technology shapes desire. We remain curious about her work, though the polished direction she shares on His & Hers produces too little tension.
Fi1m perspective
The surroundings in His & Hers (2026) look carefully arranged, but they seldom feel threatening. When the mystery slows, little unease survives between its changes of suspect. We grew tired of the repeated misdirections because the characters’ decisions were too unconvincing to sustain them. Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal make the six-part series watchable in stretches, and the care taken with its appearance is welcome. It is not enough to make this a programme we would recommend.
Marquardt’s recurring subjects are professional intimacy, therapy and simulated emotion. She’s Lost Control (2014) was her debut feature as writer-director; years spent writing unproduced features followed. The turn towards sustained television authorship came with the third season of The Girlfriend Experience (2021), for which she wrote and directed all ten episodes and served as showrunner. Set in London, that season brought artificial intelligence and data into her work on desire and behaviour. These are subjects we would like to see her pursue, particularly when she also has responsibility for the script.
His & Hers gives us a more limited basis for judging her choices: she directs three episodes, and William Oldroyd also directs the series. Doug Emmett and Ante Cheng’s cinematography supplies the gloss, with Kelly McGehee’s production design contributing to the same carefully managed finish. Those contributions work well enough to give us something to enjoy when the plotting tires. They do less to make the surroundings unsettling, which is a serious limitation for this particular programme. The lack of atmosphere cannot fairly be laid at one director’s door, but it remains the clearest disappointment.
For anyone curious about the subjects Marquardt chooses, we would start with the third season of The Girlfriend Experience. Writing and directing every episode gives us a clearer basis for judging her than three instalments of a shared production. For another mystery, we would want people whose choices we believe before we worry about the next suspect.
Biography
Anja Marquardt is a German film and television director, writer and producer. She was born in 1980 in Berlin and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts before completing an MFA at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Her feature debut She's Lost Control (2014) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the CICAE Art Cinema Award. Marquardt wrote and directed all episodes of the third season of the anthology series The Girlfriend Experience (2021). She directed three episodes of the limited series His & Hers (2026) and four episodes of Die Zweiflers (2024).
