If someone had told me before that I would laugh more in a three-hour drama about dying and death than in many comedies, I wouldn’t have believed it. Matthias Glasner’s Dying, which is running in competition at this year’s Berlinale, offered me exactly such an experience.
The director’s very personal epic is an exhilarating ride that explores profound themes in life hair-raising gags, unbearable moments of shame and brilliant acting highlights connects. Things are unlikely to get any better in the German cinema year of 2024.
Dying plot seems too absurd to be true
The synopsis for Glasner’s first feature film since Grace from 2012 reads like a parody of the usual drama entries in the film festival program. The plot is divided into several chapters, with the first each dedicated to a member of the Lunies family. There is head Lissy (Corinna Harfouch), who takes care of her severely demented husband Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), even though she is herself suffering from diabetes, cancer, kidney failure and advanced blindness (!) is.
The adult son Tom (Lars Eidinger) is the conductor of a youth orchestra and rehearses a symphony called Dying, which his best friend and severely depressed artist Bernard (Robert Gwisdek) wrote. Tom is also raising the baby of his long-time ex-girlfriend Liv (Anna Bederke), who in turn doesn’t like the biological father.
The family’s other problem child is Tom’s sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), an alcoholic dental assistant who plunges into an affair with her colleague Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld), who is (of course) married and has two children.
Berlinale highlight Dying overwhelms you with a mix of deep tragedy and crazy comedy
Dying kills you with that Abundance of interpersonal strokes of fate and existential tragedy, with which Glasner loaded his script. But the most fascinating thing about the film is that it never wants to decide on one direction.
The huge portrait of a dysfunctional family is as shrill parody as it is sincere character study, as bizarre gag parade as it is thought-provoking meditation on the big themes of life, after which death awaits everyone.
Jakub Bejnarowicz / Port au Prince, Black and White, Senator
Corinna Harfouch and Lars Eidinger in Dying
In the first chapter there is a sequence in which Lissy sends her husband Gerd into the passenger seat after shopping because he can no longer drive in his condition. At the same time, she instructs him to explain the way to her because she can no longer see well.
What follows is one absurdly funny scene like from a Til Schweiger comedyin which Harfouch’s character races towards parked cars or schoolchildren and narrowly avoids the obstacles or slows down in front of them.
But Dying is the kind of unpredictable film in which such scenes can alternate with moments that are almost unbearable, in which Glasner, for example, follows the titular death of a character for minutes in real time. Accompanying with the camera without editing and without music creates an intensity that few (especially German) directors dare to achieve with such radicalism.
Dying packs embarrassment and clichés between great acting and sincere drama and becomes a masterpiece
Glasner’s Berlinale contribution comes across as an adventurous symphony that throws at you almost everything that a film called Dying can throw at you. The 183-minute mammoth work has so many memorable individual scenes that it could fill several articles.
For example, a long scene between Lissy and Tom at the kitchen table is unforgettable. Here the mother explains that she dropped her son as a child, or rather threw him on the ground. A little later, Tom admits that he finds it almost unbearable to even have to call his mother.
Like Corinna Harfouch and Lars Eidinger shocking revelations under embarrassingly touching dialogue comedy, you simply have to see it for yourself because of the brilliantly timed acting. Just like Lilith Stangenberg, who tells Ronald Zehrfeld’s character on the phone that she loves big penises. Whereupon he tenderly explains to her that he has the big book about big penises that he can give her as a gift.
A brief moment to breathe deeply and laugh as Stangenberg then restlessly drinks, dances, sings, coughs and screams through Glasner’s film as if it were everything.
Dying is a film that combines the narrative ambition of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia with the sober unbearability of Michael Haneke’s love. And then honey in the head and full of normality! mixed underneath. He cleverly asks how much art has to bend in order to still appeal to an audience without losing its own value. And then puked all over the Berlin Philharmonic.
Dying is in competition at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival. It will be released in German cinemas on April 25, 2024.