Sisi & I

Sisi & I (Sisi & Ich, 2023) is a period drama you can watch online on iFILM. It looks at Empress Elisabeth of Austria from an unusual angle — not the postcard icon, but the woman seen by her newest lady-in-waiting, Countess Irma, who survives a strange multi-stage selection just to win the post.

Once hired, Irma (Sandra Hüller) travels with the empress to her summer villa on Corfu. Away from Vienna the court runs on its own odd rules: gymnastics, starvation diets, morphine and a cult of staying young that Elisabeth (Susanne Wolff) uses to hold herself together. The two women grow close, and that closeness turns into friction the moment Viennese protocol reclaims them. Director Frauke Finsterwalder deliberately breaks the costume-film mold with anachronistic music, dry humor and uncomfortable silences.

This one is for anyone tired of sugary Sisi biopics — here the empress is stubborn, flawed and fully alive rather than a museum portrait. An Austrian-German-Swiss production running 132 minutes. Stream Sisi & I (2023) online on iFILM.