13/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer opens this year’s festival with a didactic mix of sci-fi and social criticism

l-r: Elyas Eldridge, Nicolette Krebitz, Julius Gause, Elke Biesendorfer and Lars Eidinger in The Light

Tom Tykwer occupies a special place in the canon of “New European Cinema” after 1989, his iconic Run Lola Run a fine experimental twist on the heist movie/crime-thriller genre. Now, after devoting years of his career to period TV with Babylon Berlin, his return to the present-day world reaches us as the flashy Berlinale opener, The Light [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. While it is certainly a rare pleasure to spot the Potsdamer Platz surroundings in the very opening film, the melodramatic spark of Tykwer’s writing and directing doesn’t turn into a flame for almost all of the 162-minute running time. Its conceit (the titular “light”) promises a way to deal with loss and trauma, but the characters and the script get in the way of the film’s well-intentioned political message.

At the centre of the movie is the Engels family: Tim (Lars Eidinger, formidable as always) is the sensitive father who works for a green-washed marketing company, Milena (Nicolette Krebitz, whose directorial endeavours have also graced the Berlinale more than once) is the absent, workaholic mother, and Frieda and Jon are their two teenage kids. However, it takes a while before we even see them all together in a scene, simply because they never are; the way the film begins even suggests there might be multiple storylines, given how isolated each character is in their own daily life. But the thing that unites them is the death of their housekeeper, a Polish woman who they all admit was fairly invisible to them. As grief (or privilege guilt) thrusts them into self-awareness, the arrival of a new cleaning lady – the mysterious Farrah (Tala Al-deen) – promises a better future.

However, Tykwer prefers to decorate a rather typified plot structure with endless detours, giving us backstories, monologues, work drama, and even musical sequences to make his characters more legible. On the one hand, it’s admirable that he can and wants to give us more to hold on to, but on the other hand, the one thing that anchors this sprawling hybrid of a film is the performances. Eidinger and Krebitz are a dream duo, and their on-screen pairing delivers in turn slashing tension, explosive arguments and occasional tenderness as if it were a waltz. It seems like The Light is on occasion preoccupied with Tim and Milena’s dynamics as the core of a dysfunctional family, while the world is crumbling around them. There’s a pronounced hopelessness that creeps up even in the lighter, funnier moments, so perhaps there’s an allegorical reading of the film that sees these neurotic forty-something characters as products of post-Berlin Wall Germany.

The fact that Farrah is a highly educated Syrian refugee doesn’t surprise; the political message of the film is made clear even before its fantastical ending. Surely, no one can doubt Tykwer’s intentions to make Farrah a deus ex machina figure for a family that epitomises the middle-class frivolity of Westerners by picking at the scabs of Germany’s own self-awareness when it comes to asylum seekers. That said, the filmmaking is in shambles; the film cannot contain its own multitude of ingredients, so the script seems overwritten, the style is uneven, rather than provocative, and the supernatural framing of it all is rather naive. As much as Farrah remains a mystery and her motivations questionable, one cannot help but think of that poor Polish woman whose function was to die and move the plot forward: sadly, they both fall prey to the same storytelling trap (or trope), even when Tykwer tries hard to avoid it.

The Light is a German-French production staged by X Filme Creative Pool in co-production with Gold Rush Pictures, Gretchenfilm, B.A. Filmproduktion and ZDF. Beta Cinema handles its world sales.