‘The Light’ Review: Tom Tykwer’s Sanctimonious Paean to White Guilt Is a Quasi-Musical Mess
A bloatedly operatic saga about a liberal Berlin family coming apart and together again with the arrival of a Syrian housekeeper (Tala Al-Deen), German director Tom Tykwer’s “The Light” almost rudely keeps its audience in their seats for a very long 160-plus minutes. A discordant symphony of ideas around white guilt wherein the filmmaking itself does much of its own virtue-signaling despite trying to critique that very gesture, this slog of a Berlin Film Festival opener feels destined to languish on the European film circuit, a quote-unquote epic that would’ve been better framed as a four-part miniseries than a single feature that lacks the compression and punch of Tykwer’s 1998 breakout “Run Lola Run.”
Here is a quasi-musical, pseudo-sci-fi set in the drabbest pockets of a rain-drenched Berlin, unless it’s flinging us to Nairobi where Melina (Nicolette Krebitz) does penance for her own white guilt through NGO work, or into the traumatized memories of Farrah’s (Al-Deen) journey to Germany from Aleppo. Melina is the mother of a mixed family, led by patriarch Tim (an often unnecessary naked Lars Eidinger), who himself is a former leftist who’s killed his own years-dead liberal dreams by selling out to a company that makes performatively humanitarian promos for planet-wrecking corporations. Their kids, the teenage Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer) and Jon (Julius Gause), are totally disconnected (and who could blame them?) from their dysfunctional parents. Frieda careens through sweaty, hopped-up nights in Berlin clubs on drug benders, crawling home at dawn to collapse in her spartan bedroom, an environment manifesting the Gen Z rejection of cozy white middle-class creature comforts. Jon, meanwhile, holes up in his squalid quarters surrounded by takeout containers and dirty clothes while hooked onto a cheap-looking VR game that hardly inspires the wonderment in us it’s supposed to in him.
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In the film’s coincidence-connected opening sequence, the family’s German housekeeper dies of a sudden stroke in the kitchen at the same time an immigrant food delivery boy gets hit by a truck outside. The housekeeper’s death goes so unnoticed by her tapped-out family that her corpse remains on the kitchen tile overnight. Even Tim, who comes home from his soulless job and strips down to nothing as if to rid himself of his spirit-sucking day job, doesn’t spot his dead employee on the floor. Nor does the perpetually flustered Melina, home from another trip to Kenya, so addicted to her job that she keeps her iPhone attached to her neck on a lanyard. In Africa, she is raising money to build a community theater in a rundown city, but her state employees are about to pull the plug on her efforts.
“The Light’s” plunge through hokey, carpe-diem fringe pseudoscience takes hold of the plot as Farrah arrives at the family’s doorstep to take over as the housekeeper. And what a meddlesome one she is, injecting herself into their personal lives and serving as a proxy parent to the kids, and therapist to the parents. She opens the family’s minds to an LED lamp device that, overly and too belatedly explained in the film’s final yawning third, activates brain waves similar to DMT, the cocktail of psychoactive chemicals released at the moment of death that are meant to soothe us on our way out. The blinking light device is supposed to encourage emotional openness or something, but it also allows Farrah to astral-project into a kind of detention center where her estranged husband and two children, presumably still in Syria, can communicate with her.
Melina, meanwhile, has a Black child presumably born from an affair she had with one of her colleagues in Nairobi. And the kid seems the only sane member of the bunch, that is, until he starts belting out Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (in a cautionary tale to music estates who should reconsider handing over rights to just any movie), and “The Light” erupts into a sometimes-musical that’s cringey and embarrassing, Melina dancing in the streets in costume-jewelry-type wardrobe changes. Or Tim dancing with a chorus of shirtless male bodybuilders in a gym for reasons that don’t click. The singing-and-dancing family-in-peril bits of the movie recall Joshua Oppenheimer’s end-times, bunker-set musical “The End” but above ground this time, as “The Light” hinges on the apocalyptic at all times but never boils over beyond a cathartic screaming match between Melina and Frieda, who’s had an abortion unbeknownst to her mother and is now questioning possibly being asexual. (One of the only laughs of the movie comes from a neighbor fed up with Tim and Melina’s rows, who tells them what they really need is a good fuck. Probably true.)
The film’s exhausting length suggests Tykwer, who wrote the movie as a kind of paean to much-needed empathy in fractious geopolitical times, was too married to his own material, unwilling to cut from a sprawling thicket of story that could easily have lost an hour with no damage done. He messes with frame rates and throws in more dance sequences, like when Jon meets a fellow female gamer off the internet, and they twirl midair along the Spree river because why not? Late in the film, when Tim complains about losing a job opportunity to more diverse candidates, it sounds like the director himself, 59, railing against his own struggles to get his stories off the ground in a virtue-signaling, committee-driven film marketplace. Overall, “The Light” is reaching to say something profound about the effects of globalization on the individual, how climate change and capitalism and far-right political extremism have ruined the collective soul, but it’s sanctimoniously told with the subtlety of a power drill, the ideas never cohering into something meaningful.
The film’s over-the-top final chapter, where Farrah’s past is finally revealed, is risibly, ridiculously staged, cinematographer Christian Almesberger’s camera taking in the proceedings too dead-earnestly, overly lighting each minute as if to bring us back blatantly to the film’s metaphoric title. Tykwer, more recently known for co-creating TV’s beloved German neo-noir “Babylon Berlin,” has misapplied lessons from television to the feature form. There’s too much story here and not enough focus to bring us close enough to “The Light.”
Grade: C-
“The Light” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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