Everyone Else is a film in which a German couple travel to Sardinia and watch, almost as if helplessly, as their seemingly solid relationship erodes upon contact with foreign forces. Director Maren Ade, in her second feature,  shows an uncanny ability to produce a queasy irony from the twinning of surface beauty and interpersonal ugliness. Ade bathes her pale, freckled actors in ultra-hot golden light, and the camera casually lays in wait, watching them burn. It’s an unforgettable look for a film that stands as a new standard bearer in the hardly marginal genre of films aiming to mirror a certain kind of post-romantic passive-aggression between young lovers who, despite all mounting evidence to the contrary, persist in the delusion that they’ve found a partner for life.

Chris (Lars Eidinger) and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr, phenomenal) are about 30, and they’ve been together for long enough for the former to take the latter with him to his family’s villa, though not long enough for her to have become acquainted with Chris’ siblings or his mother’s inexhaustible appetite for kitsch. Gitti, a publicist for rock bands, has essentially found a way to monetize her zeal for hipster hanging out. Chris is an architect who, we soon come to understand, has inherently avant garde instincts that earn him a lot of back-handed praise: his work is so interesting that he’ll never get a major assignment. Chris vacillates between proudly defending his “otherness” and loudly yearning for more conventional recognition, in both the personal and professional spheres. Gitti tries to comfort him — “You don’t have to be masculine,” she says. “I don’t care if you’re successful or anything.” That’s the problem.

Ade has an incredible feel for the way couples develop a private language, using inside jokes and made-up words to unite them as a unit versus … well, everyone else. These bonds are rarely as solid as one or both members of the duo would like to think, and Ade devastatingly deconstructs how they can suddenly split open with the introduction of unfamiliar elements. The term “normal” is given slightly different connotations in different contexts. At first, it’s set up as Chris and Gitti’s code word for squares. In the beginning of the film, Chris obviously gets a kick out of Gitti’s “unconventional,” as he’ll put it later, way of confronting conflict — not least because of the disapproval it engenders in his uptight Normal sister. A bit later, Gitti tells Chris she’s met a German couple on the streets of SArdinia. Grasping for reasons to turn down their invitation for a day on their boat, Chris asks Gitti what the couple does for a living, and she responds, “I don’t know, something Normal.” In the ensuing slow-boil fight, the implication is that Chris thinks he and his girlfriend are not normal, but better than normal, not least because they work in creative fields.  And yet later, when Gitti refuses to compromise her personality to better get along with a bourgie couple who Chris claims to detest but obviously wants to impress, her boyfriend complains, “Why can’t you be Normal?”

Even within the oft-traversed cinematic terrain of romantic skepticism, this is rarely explored territory. It’s extremely difficult to use traditional narrative tools to depict how sometimes one person seems to be at least two people, how that changeover happens almost imperceptibly, and how this personality schizophrenia can be a result of outside forces and how outsiders are forced to adapt accordingly. Ade pulls it off.

Everything Else’s area of inquiry is so microscopic that it almost seems selfish to get excited about it. This is not a film that will change the world, or probably even your life. It may feel as though it is your life — it feels like mine — and so it’s possible that its effect is purely narcissistic. But Everyone Else doesn’t flatter its viewer, nor does it feel as though Ade is purely navel gazing. This is the narcissism of self-loathing, aestheticized.