Wasting Electricity: Tykwer Illuminates a Narrative Void
Despite revealing itself to be an interconnected rumination on aspects of the soul, Tom Tykwer’s Das Licht (The Light) flounders around in its own banal sort of purgatory. The director’s first feature since his 2016 Dave Eggers’ adaptation A Hologram for the King (read review) and his German language narrative feature since 2010’s 3, explores apathy and elitism within the confines of a tediously characterized nuclear family in modern day Berlin and plays like a combination of those previous efforts injected with odd breaks into futile expressionism a la his Run, Lola Run (1998) days. In short, it’s a film which feels woefully out of touch in every regard despite a handful of arresting sequences from DP Christian Almesberger (Tykwer’s “Babylon Berlin”).
Tim Engels (Lars Eidinger) and his wife Milena (Nicolette Krebitz) have reached a toxic point of stagnation in their marriage. Tim has become something of an anachronism in his profession alongside a coterie of colleagues decades younger than him as they ponder how to advertise to the ambivalent masses by asking one another “What do lost people need?” Milena has been embroiled in her desire to open a performing arts center in Nairobi, but funding seems to be inevitably withdrawn just as the project is scheduled to break ground. Together, they seem to have completely disconnected from their seventeen-year-old twins Freida (Elke Biesendorfer) and Jon (Julius Gause), the former currently pregnant and obsessed with drug fueled benders while the latter sits in his room all day playing in a VR tournament.
Collectively, they don’t notice their maid Maja, whom they barely know, has died of a heart attack on the kitchen floor, where she’s at last found a day later. Also in the mix is six-year-old Dio (Elyas Eldridge), who Milena had with Godfrey (Toby Onwumere) during an extramarital fling. Deciding the family needs to change and become more attentive, they resolve to do better with their new house cleaning replacement, Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), who introduces each of the troubled family members to a LED lamp which provides them with light therapy. But is Farrah, who only recently arrived in Berlin after having survived a traumatic event in Syria, intended to heal this family or are they on hand to heal her?
Tykwer seems to be shrieking into the void with The Light, but his message isn’t entirely clear. An eventual revelation creating more logistical questions than it answers thankfully creates a reprieve from the Engels clan and their vague first world problems as it finally confirms why poor Farrah’s decided to play a ‘magical negro’ role for this self-consumed German family. Strangely, Tykwer takes the time to slap the hands of these unhappy, dispirited characters who are keenly self-aware of their unnecessary ennui. “We exploit all the privileges of White Western better-offs!,” screams Freida awkwardly at the dinner table. Tykwer laboriously paints a character profile for nearly every member (though we learn little of Jon beyond his obsession with playing a competitive but somehow insanely lucrative VR game), each revealed with in-depth superficiality.
The film itself seems to be bored with contemplating anything detailed about the occupations which define the Engels. Milena’s desperation to open a theater center in Nairobi is never explained, and based on what we see, Tykwer’s own vision of it would be akin to the community center in Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984). What could have been better explained would have been how everyone feels about Milena having a child with Godfrey six years prior, which, as presented here, looks like she was playing a sex tourist in her free time.
As a workaround and distraction we instead get random musical asides with Milena (featuring Krebitz fashioned like a mournful Jane Wyman) and Tim (who talk-sings about physical fitness as he strides through half-naked gym rats like Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) are startling and wholly unnecessary. Freida takes a hallucinatory bike-ride through Potsdamer Platz while she envisions a random montage of provocative femme imagery, beginning with her recently aborted fetus. And, perhaps most unforgivable of all, the young Dio, another unnecessary narrative appendage, butchers Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” all throughout the film, including in a random animated aside (which is perhaps the worst crime conspired against the classic track since the film Bohemian Rhapsody, 2018).
What all this nonsensical excess leads to, at long last, brings us to the ecstasy of a magical realism reveal which merits some interest. Had Tywker reconfigured the script to focus on characters who have something to say beyond general lip service his climax could have inspired awe and horror, riding the lines of Jordan Peele and the excellent Powell & Pressburger classic A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Instead, The Light is the exemplification of well-intentioned Western perspectives making tone deaf films about disenfranchised communities or experiences (which is something ironically detailed in Krebitz’s other Berlinale film, Hysteria, from Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay). Even in its infrequent successful moments, we’ve seen this all before done better, including the existential 20024 crisis saga Dying (read review) from Matthias Glasner, headlined by Eidinger.
Tykwer’s attempts at enlightenment regarding divided contemporary humans tumble out in a film akin to a chaotic, babbling torrent as he hammers away at some sort of erstwhile truth he gleaned through a glass darkly. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and Tykwer’s latest is in need of divine intervention.
Reviewed on February 13th at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (75th edition) – Berlinale Special Gala. 162 mins.
★/☆☆☆☆☆
