The Light (Germany, 2025)
Original title: Das Licht
Director: Tom Tykwer
Screenplay: Tom Tykwer
Main cast: Lars Eidinger, Nicolette Krebitz, Michael Ihnow, Marius Biegai, Elyas Eldridge, Julius Gause and Elke Besendorfer
Running time: 162 minutes
Light is the electromagnetic radiation band that our eyes are able to capture. With this in mind and knowing Tom Tykwer, a German director famous for movies like Run, Lola, Run (1998) and Cloud Atlas (2012), it would be hard to think of a more significant film to start the 75th Berlinale.
The plot works as a light guide to talk about the light that the director really wants to address. We have a family made up of peculiar characters in their own right: Tim (Lars Eidinger), a man who has been married for many years and wants to rekindle the passion in his relationship with his wife; Milena (Nicolette Krebitz), a wife who cares so much about a social project she leads in an African country that she has simply forgotten about the life that lies ahead of her in Berlin; Jon (Julius Gause), the stereotypical boy addicted to games with difficulty relating to people; his twin sister Frieda (Elke Besendorfer), a party girl who is barely at home; and Dio (Elyas Eldridge), a son whose custody is shared with his father and who ends up appearing and disappearing throughout the story. If it seems that the work is addressing many issues at the same time, it’s because it is. There are so many things happening at the same time that it becomes difficult to follow – but this is precisely the effect that the movie wants to have on its viewers. If we try to fit the film into the more traditional script molds, we think that it will begin when a maid in the house dies on the job and it takes hours until we discover her dead there. However, in one of those cases in which we only really understand the work from its end, we realize that its first scene actually already addressed what was to come.
The work ends up bringing a trait already very present in Tykwer’s works about the intersectionality of life. Not necessarily about an immutable destiny, he actually celebrates the art of encounters, placing several small narratives that speak about the transformative power of emotional bonds and collectivity. This is possible through a well-structured script and a work with quick cuts and dynamic scenes, which often relate to what was happening in the previous scene through mise-en-scéne. We feel a continuity of facts and subjects, which seems to be the director’s intention.
Between emotional moments and refined and funny dialogues, we notice a lot of self-reference in Tykwer’s work. There is a return to Berlin, with a strong emphasis on the city’s landmarks, as happened in Run, Lola, Run, and also appeared for a supernatural and science fiction volume of Cloud Atlas. We also have a feeling very similar to Sense 8 regarding the continuity of actions between characters in different scenes. There seems to be a moment of looking at oneself and even inserting pieces of self-criticism into the text, which plays a lot with the European notion of the white savior when they are often the one causing problems that they later want to solve.
Despite so many qualities, the final result of the work is somewhat inconsistent. There is a combination of several elements that end up making the film tiresome and even pedantic in the way it interconnects all these themes. Despite the large number of good ideas being developed, one gets the feeling that they never advance enough and remain in a middle ground between following a more traditional cinematic logic or simply throwing themselves into a more experimental notion. It’s only when we see its final moments that the film decides to embrace its essence, embraced by the supernatural, that we understand its entire logic, but after more than two hours the film has already lost the attention of most of its viewers.
Far from being a bad film, it seems like a film made by a person in crisis, and whose crisis is reflected at every moment within the work. As a person constantly in existential crisis, I can embrace its meaning well, but I cannot help but understand that it does not work so well with all audiences.
