Back to the 90s Review: Musical Nostalgia With Unfinished Business

The song playing during an argument in an elevator becomes essential listening for the five musicians of 5G. Thrown back to 1995, they must recreate the circumstances of their displacement to get home, which means finding that recording without the convenience of a working phone. Director Facundo Scalerandi gives this German-language comedy an appealingly practical problem. A band already struggling to make music together now needs to track down somebody else’s song, identify its creators, and get hold of a cassette. Finding the right tune has become a shared responsibility.

That connection gives the time travel a useful relationship to the band’s troubles. Ben, played by Jacob Rott, has lost confidence while trying to write the song that might make their university showcase a success. His difficulty creating music sits alongside the group’s difficulty accessing it. I like how the screenplay makes those pressures coexist without requiring a complicated explanation of the elevator. We understand the immediate objective and the anxiety underneath it: recovering a recording might solve the travel problem, but Ben still has to believe he can contribute something of his own.

The hunt also gives the period comedy something to work with. Watching the friends tap at a bulky desktop monitor is funny because their mistake comes from an ordinary expectation. They know how screens should respond; this one refuses to cooperate. Having to compete for access to the library’s internet computer extends the joke into the action. Information is available, but getting to it requires patience and negotiation. The screenplay, by Marian Grönwoldt, Juliana Lima Dehne, and Joy C. Mitchell, finds a useful comic reversal here: young men accustomed to immediate access become conspicuously helpless around a machine that other people can use perfectly well.

These inconveniences give 1995 a stronger presence than the period Pepsi branding or the familiar shapes of Walkmans. A printed phone book asks the characters to change their behavior. A label asks the audience to recognize an object. Both have a place in a nostalgic comedy, though I found the practical obstacles much livelier than the decorative recognition. The joke about everyone in the past looking older has a pleasant double audience, too. Younger viewers get the friends’ surprise, while viewers familiar with older youth movies can recognize their habit of casting conspicuously mature faces as students.

The images are less helpful. Their gauzy softness reduces crisp detail across the frame, with backgrounds sometimes becoming distractingly blurred. This gives the past an inviting, slightly unreal appearance, but it also makes the surroundings harder to enjoy as surroundings. A film so interested in the objects of another decade benefits from letting us look at them. The library’s limited technology creates a specific environment with rules the friends must learn; the hazy photography makes that environment feel less tangible. The visual nostalgia is laid on heavily enough to compete with the more effective nostalgia built into the action.

The group’s own aspirations bring some welcome specificity back. Chris, played by Luis Freitag, faces a different obstacle from Ben’s creative insecurity: his father’s expectations threaten to direct him away from music altogether. His connection with a student over guitar music gives that conflict a human scale. Shared enthusiasm becomes a reason to keep talking, rather than a speech about following one’s dreams. The encounter also allows the film’s generational premise to develop beyond technological confusion. Chris can struggle with the equipment of another decade and still find someone there who understands why he wants to play.

Oliver’s romantic subplot with a photography student gives Bene Schulz room to work outside the band’s collective identity, while his encounter with the university tech librarian lets flirtation and practical necessity occupy the same comic situation. Schulz benefits from having those different circumstances to play. Around him, Tim Schäcker’s Jonas provides cohesion, and Julien Brown’s Matteo brings an assured comic manner, particularly when sarcastically explaining Back to the Future. That reference establishes that the boys recognize the kind of predicament they have entered. It supplies a laugh without making the elevator’s rules any more inventive.

As a feature debut for the real-life Elevator Boys, the film sensibly gives its performers separate interests while drawing on their familiarity as a group. The limitation is that distributing a romance, a confidence crisis, and a parental conflict can leave the individual stories feeling lightly sketched. Ben and Chris have distinct reasons to hesitate over the same musical future, and those differences deserve room. The plot’s search keeps pulling attention back toward a common solution. Its tidiness is uneven elsewhere: Daniel, another person caught up in the elevator’s history, is left without a satisfying resolution to his thread.

The closing showcase places considerable weight on “1995,” the Gary Barlow-written number that joins “Gotta Make It Work” among the film’s original songs. Its boy-band pop style suits the setting, and the coordinated choreography gives the reunion a visible form. Five separate personalities have to perform together, with everyone contributing to the same routine. This is where the casting becomes especially useful. The performers’ experience as a musical group provides a confidence that the film can put directly on screen, rather than asking dialogue to explain how well these friends belong together.

I found that shared performance easier to believe than the suggestion that each personal uncertainty has received enough attention along the way. A polished routine can show cooperation immediately; confidence in one’s writing and freedom from parental expectations take longer to establish. Still, the showcase gives Ben’s early fear a concrete destination. The song he struggled to supply was never going to remain a private test of talent. It had to become something the others could inhabit, sing, and move to together.

Back to the 90s premiered globally on Amazon Prime Video on August 21, 2026. Directed by Facundo Scalerandi, the musical comedy follows the members of a rising contemporary boyband who find themselves accidentally transported back to 1995 just days before their biggest career showcase.

Full Credits

• Title: Back to the 90s

• Distributor: Amazon Prime Video

• Release date: August 21, 2026

• Rating: PG-13

• Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes (91 minutes)

• Director: Facundo Scalerandi

• Writers: Juliana Lima Dehne, Marian Grönwoldt

• Producers and Executive Producers: Quirin Berg, Max Wiedemann, Benjamin Benedict, Johanna Bergel

• Cast: Bene Schulz, Jacob Rott, Julien Brown, Luis Freitag, Tim Schäcker, Felicitas Woll, Derya Akyol, Miles Hafeneth