It rains. And in streams. Even in the gray February days, in which Berlin is anything but a happy, hopeful place, the amount of wet is surprising that is pounding on the asphalt in this year’s Berlinale opening film. When people pull through the streets in capes and hoods, the light draws an almost apocalyptic picture of the capital. But that’s just the beginning.
With his first film in nine (!) Years, Tom Tykwer whirls up the German cinema and complains to the festival its most fascinating opening film for years. Often the works that are at the beginning of a Berlinale are smiled at tired due to their harmlessness. The light However, flashes so brightly and with such an urgent frequencythat you cannot escape the start of the first Berlinale issue under the direction of Tricia Tuttle. You must have experienced this film to believe it.
The light: the Berlinale begins with a family drama that you have never seen before
How much the Berlinale under Tuttle will change will only be shown in the next few days. In any case, the light is a promising, unpredictable introduction to the program that leads us around the world. Basically, it seems that Tykwer wanted the whole world-or at least every thought that is currently shooting through his head-anchoring a Berlin family in this 162-minute study.
Here you can look at the trailer for the light:
The light – trailer (German) HD
The angels are the center of the light, led by Milena (Nicolette Krebitz) and Tim (Lars Eidinger), who are theoretically married with each other, but put all of their strength in jobs with which you can believe that you can improve the world. For example, through funding programs in developing countries or advertising campaigns that remind us of who is really the problem for the decline of the planet: we.
Everything was just hypocrisy, daughter Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer) would say, who is never relocated to the Double morality and privileges of their family to point out. That is not interested in her twin brother Jon (Julius Gause). He prefers to escape into a video game with VR glasses. And then there would be Dio (Elyas Eldridge), Milena’s son of another man who is completely obsessed by Bohemian Rhapsody.
Sooner or later you all have to be packed by the rain, sometimes in thick clothes, sometimes splinter fiber – after all, we are talking about a film with Lars Eidinger in the leading role. However, the angels are not really united. Dysfunctional family would be euphemism. Farrah (Tala al deen) also recognizes this very quickly. She is the new housekeeper and fled from Syria five years ago.
Tykwer, who also wrote the script, uses Farrah at first glance to keep the mirror to the other characters. She has nothing of what the angels have wasted in their supposedly progressive lifestyle – especially a family that can come together in a large, cozy apartment. But this superficial level of the exposure is only interested in Tykwer.
Tykwer has unloaded everything that has been thawed in it in the past nine years
While the light fluctuates briskly between meaning -pregnant drama and a bitter satire, Tykwer discovers something else in dialogue between Farrah and the others. For the first time there is a sincere interest in the hidden and repressed things in Engels – and the discharge with a cinematic forcewhich makes even the worst instincts of the film look irrelevant.
Not only have a lot of unspoken feelings accumulated in the characters, but also at Tykwer, the filmmaker. Since the 2016 published a hologram for the king, he was no longer represented on the big screen. The past decade was primarily devoted to the emergence of the history series Babylon Berlin, which now comprises four seasons with a total of 40 episodes.
As considerable as Babylon Berlin is as a major project: the light feels as if Tykwer wanted to catch up with everything he could not do in the cinema over the years. Suddenly she is back, the energy that Lola runs is burning into the memory of film history. However, even more, the light of Tykwers consumed more Cooperation with the Wachowski sistersespecially Cloud Atlas and Sense8.
These stories are penetrated by a thought: that people are connected to each other across any kind of borders, even beyond the place and time. With elaborate assembly, clever cuts and visual diversity, the Wachowskis together with Tykwer have created a amazing, curious and incredibly ambitious cinema that lives in every setting of the light.
Comes for the prestige film, remains for the unexpectedly popping fantasy musical, which catapults its figures through urban gaps and lets weight over the water glide before the rain turns into the floods of the ocean and the living room first to the interrogation room and then to the falling refugee ship becomes. None of this can be predicted, for good and bad.
As fearless, hungry and curious as the light is rare German cinema
Are we watching a German Mary Poppins update here in 2025, in which a mysterious housekeeper patches the broken heart of a alienated family? Or sneaks Farrah based on Parasite’s model in the large Berlin apartment of the Engels and gradually takes the position of mother, father, sister and brother until she has won the full control over the family?
The light could mutate into a transfigurating contemporary check at any moment and operate one unbearable cliché after another. Tykwers free staging, which is flirted with the German mainstream comedy and also likes the cryptic horror thriller, expands every scene at least one irritating detailThat you can’t expect what turn follows next.
Has Lars Eidinger just delivered his personal i’m just Ken moment when his monologue goes into vocals and he ponderes his male fragility against the background in the gym against the background? And Tykwer really constructed the entire film about the individual passages of Bohemian Rhapsody, which in the most unlikely moments blow up.
In fact, the light sees as Comnown counterpart to Queens Rock-Eposwhich covers a wide variety of music genres over six sections, from the ballad to opera before everything escalates in the hard rock part. The light is a film full of mood swings, which, however, merged as smoothly as if Tykwer was still shooting with the Wachowskis Cloud Atlas and Sense8.
Even the music – Tykwer has come together again with Johnny Klimek, with which he composed, UA Matrix Resurrections – brings individual harmonies back from the cloud atlas and ensures goosebumps several times, so that you do not even notice when the film stumbles over your own ambitions. But that’s exactly what you can see for this hungry work that cinema wants to try out regardless of losses.
We saw the light as part of the Berlinale 2025. On March 20, 2025, Tom Tykwer’s new film officially started in German cinemas.