Tom Tykwer – “The Light” at the Berlinale: dead do not like to travel alone

The “secret chambers” of the cinema wants to open Tom Tykwer, show the magical dimension that still gives their spells to the most common things. He succeeds better, sometimes worse. But you have to keep him to put it over that he has remained true to his kind of cinema since “Lola run” from 1998.

You remember: In this film, Franka Potente has to save her friend as Lola, a courier in the criminal milieu. He left a bag with a lot of money in the subway and is now calling Lola to tell her that he had to retrieve the money. That is why he will now be attacked a supermarket. She summons him to wait with it, she comes to him immediately. He gives her 20 minutes. We see Lola running three times, tiny details change three times – and thus the outcome of the story. Timmings that were spelled in spell. Already here, Tykwer’s passion for a high acceleration cinema was shown in which mysterious events play a key role. One could also speak of a strong esoteric touch.

In 2002 Tykwers “Heaven” opened the Berlinale. A drug thriller with an unusual outcome: in the end the escape stands into the clouds. Something similar could be seen in 1951 in Vittorio de Sicas “The Miracle of Milan”, where the slum dwellers move in the end and singed to the sky. This magical realism was impressive.

Some also see such a magical realist in Tom Tykwer, such as the new director of the Berlinale Tricia Tuttle. She says about “The Light”, with which this year’s Berlinale opened, this film catches “The essence of our life today magically on the screen”.

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Tykwer’s intention was certain, but the result can be shared. Let’s put it this way: Whoever considers the television series “Babylon Berlin” to be great film art can also find “the light” magically. But it looks more like a cinematic patchwork, as it could be assembled by a AI – in the style of “Babylon Berlin”. Interestingly, this is the first Berlinale opening film that does not run in the competition (beyond competition), but in the “Berlinale special” series. Apparently there were very different opinions about the artistic value of “The Light”, which lasts 162 minutes. It may sound unfair, but subjective judgments about films cannot be avoided: I see the principle of “Babylon Berlin” at work all the time in “The Light”. Once a television series, always television series?

Tykwer not only directed, he also wrote the script – and this is full of all conceivable clichés, regarding the current existence of a bourgeois large -scale family, in which everyone has long become alien. Milena Engels works freelance for a development project in Nairobi (a theater), but the struggle for the financing and work organization on site worsen them. Nicolette Krebitz plays it well: always full of good will and yet permanently overwhelmed.

Her husband Tim Engels (with the habitus to be the German film actor par excellence: Lars Eidinger) likes to give himself left-alternative, maintain his slightly neglected look and only ride a bike-but works for a media agency that with the guilty conscience of the prosperity Times of crises of all kinds. The 17-year-old twins (Elke Biesendorfer and Julius Gause) live in their respective world bubbles. So far not unusual.

But then strange things happen. The household help of the Engels gets a heart attack and dies a lonely death – because it takes a long time to find someone from the dystopian family at all. It lies in the middle of the kitchen. But here everyone has so hurry that they don’t look at the floor. In front of the house, a pizza rabbit is run over at the same time, from which the housekeeper had just received the pizza. Now both are dead. A coincidence?

When it comes to skillfully putting cinematic details in the picture, Tykwer shows his directorial talent. But now the film, which was worth seeing until then, begins to develop its very special, mysterious fable. A Syrian woman sits on a balcony on Leipziger Strasse in Berlin who shares an apartment with other refugees. She sits in front of a lamp that flickers strangely. It is a special lamp, she explains to her roommates, because she wakes up brain regions with her light impulses, which are otherwise activated for dying. She is a trained psychologist, but does not want to talk about her dramatic escape history. We then get a hint: she deals with the soul of the dead who need a guide (or let’s: companion) on her trip to the hereafter. This not only corresponds to ancient Egyptian ideas of death.

What does this finger tell us? Tala al-Deen is that mysterious Farrah with her so annoying flickering lamp, which does not say why she-highly qualified as she is-wants to work as a household help with a German family. And the Engels family, after the sudden death of their domestic help, is looking for a new one? You have no idea that Hitchcock would have known something to do from this story. But Tykwer is getting more and more into his esoteric fantasies. So there is no magic that grows out of cinematic intensity solely. Farrah’s dead family seems to be locked up somewhere – we see them behind bars. Otherwise nobody can be seen there.

It comes to the showdown when Farrah schedule the ultimate Séance for which she needs the whole family of four. But one is missing, the youngest son Dio, whom Milena has with a Kenyan and who now lives with them. Apparently he also has magical powers, which he developed when he sings. Well, there is plenty of dancing and singing here – see “Babylon Berlin”, because this has already proven to be helpful there against picking up boredom.

But somehow all of that doesn’t matter to me. It looks more like a adult education course on the topic “Everyone can dance and sing expressively!”. (No, you can’t.) I am thinking of Paolo Sorrentino’s high -precision dance dramaturgies, for example in “La Gande Belezza” or “Eternal Youth”, whose cinematic dynamics are banging. There is nothing of that here.

That is why one is more embarrassed by the attempt to drive the great magic with the soul of the dead here. That has something of the penetrating harmlessness of a therapeutic role play. Tom Tykwer could learn something about real mystery films from his leading actress Nicolette Krebitz. As a director, she had with no great technical effort, but with a safe dramaturgical instinct with “The Heart is a Dark Forest” (2008) and “Wild” (2016) two completely unexplained films. In contrast, “the light” is a technically elaborate and mostly well -played, but filmically quite insignificant attempt to overcome the border of life and death with cinematic means.

“The Light”, Germany 2025. Book and Director: Tom Tykwer. With: Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger, Tala al-Deen, Elke Biesendorfer. 162 minutes. (All other ideas are sold out.)