‘The Light’ Review: Tom Tykwer’s Self-Indulgent Musings on 21st Century Human Existence Open Berlin on a Trying Note

One thing German writer-director Tom Tykwer has never lacked is ambition, evidenced by his willingness to tackle sprawling, thematically unwieldy literary source material like Cloud Atlas and A Hologram for the King. His first feature in almost ten years has no such foundation on which to build. Despite having a lot on its mind about our disconnected 21st century lives and the creeping anxieties of a liberal society crumbling perhaps beyond repair, The Light (Das Licht) is about nothing so much as its own ostentatious virtuosity. Somehow both hyper-kinetic and lumbering, the movie at least has the distinction of being too irritating to be boring.

Related Stories

Movies

Quiet Berlin Market Wraps With Few Big Deals But Some Optimism

Business

Cinemark Posts Record Fourth-Quarter Revenue, Swings to Profit and Reinstates Dividend

In place of the tired trope of the “Magical Negro,” Tykwer gives us the Magical Middle-Easterner, a Syrian woman able to put her own nightmarish refugee trauma on hold long enough to coax a broken Berlin family out of their isolated bubbles and guide them back toward reconciliation. “Are you our cleaner or our therapist?” one of them asks Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), long after the audience has figured out the answer.

Tykwer isn’t patronizing enough to make Farrah merely an altruistic saint, even if she comes close. She also wants something in return from the family who hires her after their Polish housekeeper drops dead on the job and they acknowledge the shame of knowing almost nothing about her.

Exactly what Farrah needs from them is teased out until the climactic stretch. But there are clues in her evasiveness about her husband and their teenage children, the cryptic nature of scenes in which they appear, and some early dialogue about the souls of people unaware they have died, wandering the Earth and waiting to be freed.

The overly literal but still strangely beautiful sequence in which the veil is lifted on that mystery is among the more successful of the many elaborate set-pieces in eclectic styles crammed into a bloated running time of two-and-three-quarter hours. Those stylistic flourishes range from dance interludes to playful musical numbers, animation to levitational fantasy. There’s also a white-knuckle brush with disaster during an international commercial flight and a trippy zip through the Berlin night that’s like Run Lola Run on a bicycle.

Tykwer appears to be experimenting with different modes of storytelling, shaking up the ways in which we access his characters’ interior lives. But almost all the directorial showboating serves Tykwer more than it serves the prolix narrative. Those touches also contribute to the sense that the director is trying to squish three or four movies into one, all of them stubbornly unengaging.

The Engels family share the same cluttered, boho-shabby house but lead mostly separate lives. Habitually late Tim (Lars Eidinger) thinks of himself as a leftist intellectual pushing for societal change but has sold out by working on virtue-signaling promo campaigns for the corporate monoliths destroying the world. His exhausted wife Milena (Nicolette Krebitz) has spent 15 years working with a non-governmental agency in Kenya to develop a community theater center in a slum area, a project whose German funding is now threatened.

Their 17-year-old daughter Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer) is a club kid with a tight-knit band of activist friends who snort coke, drop acid and slam around the dance floor when not staging protests about the complacency of their parents’ generation and its consequences for the planet. Frieda’s twin brother Jon (Julius Gause) keeps his life so separate that he padlocks his bedroom door and spends all his time honing his skills as a competitive VR gamer. Frieda is still figuring out her sexuality while Jon lacks the courage to transition a budding online romance into the real world.

Couples counseling hasn’t done a lot for the tensions in Tim and Milena’s sexless marriage — he feels unseen, undesired; she feels she lost her sense of self the minute she became a mother. The most concrete result of therapy has been Milena’s acknowledgment that childbirth was an agonizing experience; her slow-burning resentment of the ungrateful twins has been building ever since.

She describes having an out-of-body experience during labor, looking down on the scene in the obstetrics ward from above. That detachment remains in place no matter how hard Milena fights against it.

Every second week, there’s also a fifth member of the household, an eight-year-old boy grandiloquently named Dio (Elyas Eldridge), the Italian word for God. He’s the child that resulted from Milena’s extramarital relationship in Nairobi with Gordon (Toby Onwumere), a Black man dissatisfied with his life in Berlin when he is handed an opportunity to return home.

Dio wanders around singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which can be interpreted as an anthem for stepping out of the darkness to live an authentic life. At one point he conjures a bunch of dancers on the street while Tim, Milena and Gordon all chime in on the operatic midsection (see also: Magical Negro).

When the Engels family hires Farrah, it’s almost as if the highly educated and accomplished immigrant has chosen them, right when they all come to the realization that something must change. Or maybe Farrah nudges them toward that realization. Either way, the heavy rain pouring down on Berlin for much of the film suggests an aggressive cleansing.

The other key plot point is Farrah’s use of stroboscopic light therapy to stimulate brain activity and neural responses. One by one, she sits the family members down in front of a flashing lamp to face whatever is imprisoning them, eventually assembling them in a group session that will be even more cathartic for her. As for the troubled Engels clan, it seems simplistic after two hours of convoluted preamble that all they really need is to experience one another’s respective worlds.

Returning to features after almost a decade focusing on the wildly successful neo-noir TV series set during the Weimar era, Babylon Berlin, Tykwer remains a bold visual stylist. DP Christian Almesberger’s camerawork is sleek and dynamic, and the electronic score by Johnny Klimek and the director bends with the movie’s many shifts in tone and mood while keeping the action propulsive. But that doesn’t mean it’s not turgid.

The number of shrieking arguments in The Light is high even by the standards of the most extreme German angst. But the forays into goofy comedy are almost worse, notably a loud fight between Tim and Milena on the stairwell of their building, prompting a neighbor to fling open her door and scream, “Are you two out of your minds? Go have a decent fuck! With eye contact!”

Tykwer and editors Alexander Berner and Claus Wehlisch get so tricksy with the structure in the early going that the patience of many will be exhausted just identifying the connective tissue between the choppy scenes. No audience should have to work so hard for so little.

And no cast should have to work this hard either to get viewers to care about such a bunch of abrasive characters. Only Al-Deen as Farrah fully registers as a multidimensional human being. That’s also because the characters always seem of secondary importance to the director compared to his pyrotechnic craftsmanship.