Margot (Carstensen) is a mother and housewife in Germany who begins to experience sudden bouts of inexplicable angst that soon lead to a suicidal depression. Ignored by her clueless student husband (Faulhaber), and nagged at disapprovingly by her mother- and sister-in-law, Margot quells her anxiety with excessive drink and pills prescribed by a local doctor (Hoven) with ulterior motives.

Fassbinder’s cinema is seldom cheery, but his portrait of an isolated bourgeois woman in “Fear of Fear” is so sympathetic and carefully observed that it’s hard not to identify with the emptiness at the heart of Margot’s domestic life, rendered here from a subtle, shivery point-of-view perspective. Excellent support from Fassbinder regulars Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann as the unfeeling in-laws lend real pathos to this intriguing psychological melodrama in the mold of Douglas Sirk.