An inflated operatic saga about a liberal Berlin Family who come apart and together again with the arrival of a Syrian housekeeper (speak al-Deen), German director Tom Tywker’s “The Light” Almost in a rude way, their audience keeps in their seats for very long 160 plus minutes. An incredible symphony of ideas about white debt where filmmaking itself makes much of his own virtue signaling despite trying to criticize the very gesture, this struck by a Berlin Film Festival opener feel intended to disappear on the European film Circuit, a quotation-ocott epic that would have been better framed as a four-part miniseries than a single feature that lacks compression and punch by Twyker’s 1998 Breakout “Run Lola Run.”
Here is a Kvasi-musical, pseudo-SCI-fi set in the hit pockets in a rain-borne Berlin, unless it throws us to Nairobi where Melina (Nicolette Krebitz) makes cure for her own white whitening through NGO work, or into Traumatized memories from Farrah’s (al-Deen) trip to Germany from Aleppo. Melina is the mother of a mixed family, led by patriarch Tim (an often unnecessary nude Lars Eidinger), who himself is a former left who has killed his own year-dead liberal dreams by selling out to a company that makes performative humanitarian campaigns for Planet -Voling companies. Their children, teens Frieda (Elke Biendorfer) and Jon (Julius Guse), are completely disconnected (and who can blame them?) From their dysfunctional parents. Frieda cares through sweaty, jumped nights in Berlin clubs at drugs, creeping home at dawn to collapse in their Spartan bedroom, an environment that manifests the Gen Z showing of cozy white middle class comfort. In the meantime, Jon hole in his narrow neighborhoods surrounded by roof containers and dirty clothes while connected to a cheap VR game that hardly inspires the wonder in us that it is supposed to be in him.
In the film’s coincident connection sequence, the family’s German housekeeper dies of a sudden kind in the kitchen while an immigrant food delivery boy is hit by a truck outside. The household’s death goes so unnoticed by her lost family that her corpses remain on kitchen tiles overnight. Even Tim, who comes home from his self -employment job and strips down to nothing as if he is going to get rid of his spirit -sucking day job, does not see his dead employee on the floor. Nor did the constantly dazzled Melina, home from another trip to Kenya, so depending on her job that she keeps her iPhone attached to her neck on a Lanyard. In Africa, she raises money to build a community theater in a downturn, but her government employees are in contact with her efforts.
“The light‘S “throws itself through Hokey, Carpe-Diem Frans Pseudoscience takes hold of the action when Farrah, who arrives at the family door to take over as a housekeeper. And what a meddlesome she is, injects herself in their personal lives and serves as a proxy parent to The children and therapist to the parents. She opens the family’s mind to an LED lamp device which, too delayed explained in the film’s last yawning third, activates brainwaves similar to DMT, cocktail of psychoactive chemicals released at the time of death intended to calm down Our resort. The flashing light unit is supposed to encourage emotional openness, or something, but it can also project to a kind of detention center where her foreign husband and two children, probably still in Syria, can communicate with her.
Meanwhile, Melina has probably a black child born from a deal she had with one of her colleagues in Nairobi. And the child seems to be the only sensible member of the group, that is, until he begins to belt out the Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (in a precautionary story to the music brackets that should reconsider the surrender of rights to just any movie) and “The Light” spreads To an sometimes musical that is Cringey and embarrassing, Melina who dances on the streets of costume-jewelry-type wardrobe changes. Or Tim -Dance with a choir of shirt -free male bodybuilders in a gym for reasons that don’t click. The singing-and-dancing family-in-perili pieces in the film recall Joshua Oppenheimer’s end times, bunker-set-set-set-set “The End” but over the ground this time, as the “light” hangs on the apocalyptic all the time but never boils over a Catartically screaming match between Melina and Frieda, who has had an abortion that does not know her mother and now questions to be asexual. (One of the only laughs in the movie comes from a neighbor who is tired of Tim and Melina’s lines, who tells them what they really need is a good fan. Probably true.)
The film’s exhausting length suggests that Tywker, who wrote the film as a kind of Paean to much needed empathy in cracked geopolitical times, was too married to his own material, reluctant to cut from a spreading story that could easily have lost an hour without injury. He crushes with sculptures and throws in more dance sequences, such as when Jon meets a fellow player from the Internet, and they spin Midair along the Spree River why not? Late in the film, when Tim complains about losing a job opportunity to more different candidates, it sounds like the director himself, 59, who is enough for his own struggles to get his stories from the ground in a virtue signaling, committee -driven film market. All in all, the “light” reaches something deep about the effects of globalization on the individual, how climate change and capitalism and right right -wing political extremism have destroyed the collective soul, but it is sacredly told with the subtlety of a power drill, the ideas never merging anything meaningful.
The film’s final final chapter, where Farrah’s past is finally revealed, is riceable, ridiculously staged, film photographer Christian Almesberger’s camera that takes in the procedure for deadly, too lighting every minute as to bring us back to the film to the movie to the movie Metaphorical Title. Tywker, recently known for co-creation TV’s beloved German neo-noir “Babylon Berlin”, has incorrectly applied lessons from television to functional form. There is too much history here and not enough focus to get us close enough “light.”
Rating: C-
“The Light” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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