MIFF 2024 | ‘Dying’ review: Shaky family tragicomedy that still sticks its landing
Headed by a revelatory Lars Eidinger, Matthias Glasner’s autopsy of the nuclear family project handles its existentially weighty themes with equal pathos and panache.
Lars Eidinger in "Dying." Photo courtesy of Jakub Bejnarowicz.
An older woman crumples dejectedly to the floor, struggling to hold a shit-streaked mobile phone to her ear as her confused, naked husband ambles past. “You have to come home,” she says, crinkling up her nose at the phone’s stench, even as her husband continues to obliviously call her name. “Your father’s getting worse.”
This tragicomic yet matter-of-fact look at the perils of getting older is how “Dying,” Matthias Glasner’s three-hour family epic, officially opens. It is an accurate tone-setter for the rest of the film, which wends its way through multi-generational perspectives on the many different ways families can fall apart (or, conversely, find each other). The concept of the nuclear family has long been idolised on the silver screen, but you will find none of that here. The three hour, three minute runtime of “Dying” is dedicated to Glasner’s detailed dissection of one such nuclear family at the end of its rope; an unforgiving autopsy that lays out the countless ways that family ties often fall short in our quest for human connection.
“Dying” is divided into five parts and focuses on three members of the estranged Lunies family, who each boast varying levels of derangement as implied by the pun in their family name. There is Lissy (Corinna Harfouch), the Lunies matriarch, who is struggling to come to terms with her growing infirmity (and inability to control her bowels) while also caring for her increasingly senile husband Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer). Aware that she is approaching the end of her life, Lissy attempts to reconnect with her son Tom (a revelatory Lars Eidinger), the conductor of a Berlin-based youth orchestra who struggle to find any interest in performing his musical partner Bernard’s (Robert Gwisdek) latest composition, a sweeping aria also titled “Dying.”
In true postmodern fashion, Tom has his own hang-ups. He is the stepfather to a baby that is not his, co-parenting his not-quite-daughter with his not-quite-ex-girlfriend Liv (Anna Bederke), while also embarking on a stilted romance with his not-quite-lover Ronja (Saskia Rosendahl). Despite his grasping attempts at human connection mostly resulting in fleeting, ephemeral fragments rather than anything lasting, Tom is still less than enthused at the chance to reconnect with not only his mother but also his gamine, alcoholic sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg). Ellen’s own narrative is a little trite when it comes to sad women onscreen — the doomed, alcohol-fuelled relationship with a married boss feels like the least inspired part of Glasner’s screenplay — but the way her life interplays with her mother and brother’s also provide us with some of the film’s most tender yet heartbreaking moments.
As with most cross-generational family epics, “Dying” is buoyed up by the strength of its cast’s performances. In particular, Lars Eidinger’s wonderfully expressive turn as frustrated conductor Tom is nothing short of revelatory, with Eidinger channelling what feels like the slightly goofy, German male equivalent of Lydia Tár; as commanding onstage as he is hapless off it. Lilith Stangenberg’s Ellen is also hypnotising onscreen, a whirling dervish in dimly lit bars wringing every bit of empathy and emotion out of her character’s otherwise clichéd narrative. While the lack of more interplay between each of the principal characters’ chapters is a little regrettable, the chance to see Eidinger and Stangerberg shine in their own segments more than makes up for it, and might even have been a directorial choice to avoid one brilliant performance overshadowing another.
Of course, though, there is the issue of that three-hour runtime — only a few films spanning 180 minutes or longer actually warrant such a runtime, and “Dying” is sadly not one of them. Plenty of fat could have been trimmed off the bones of Glasner’s screenplay, especially when most of the film’s slower moments never quite reach their full potential, bogged down by staid cinematography and the lack of a particularly rousing score. At its best, the script manages to tackle the ways our families often fail us in petty yet unavoidable ways, with a standout twenty-minute dialogue at the film’s midway point highlighting the true, irreconcilable dysfunction between Tom and Lissy. Yet at its worst, the film sometimes loses itself altogether — Ellen’s narrative gets no such illuminating moment, and we never really find out why she is estranged from her mother and brother, even though such a detail would arguably be pivotal in fleshing out the Lunies family saga.
In similar fashion, many of Glasner’s other female characters often have their intriguing plot threads cast aside carelessly; the most egregious example being the plight of Mi-Do (Saerom Park), a cellist in an off-again, on-again, possibly abusive relationship with Tom’s composer and collaborator Bernard. Bernard’s own irritating brand of melancholic tantrums, the kind where someone’s mental illness is selfishly made everybody else’s problem, is arguably given a little too much screen time, leaving barely any time to explore the much more interesting avenue of the complexities of Mi-Do’s precarious position in a fraught affair with a colleague. Even Lissy, the subject of the film’s first chapter, all but disappears from Glasner’s directorial focus halfway through the film — and while our lack of closure for her narrative could arguably be a thematic flourish from Glasner, one can’t help but feel a little disgruntled when considering that Tom and Bernard have their stories wrapped up in neat little bows by the end. Omissions like these are perhaps the film’s greatest flaw, and the biggest obstacle preventing “Dying” from becoming a true contender alongside the other zeitgeist-capturing epics of the postmodern era.
Bloated as it may be, “Dying” is still an admirable achievement, even if it is one that ends up stumbling over its own ambition and scope. Unafraid to engage with the oft-unexplainable messiness of family ties, and to a lesser extent, the unexpected ways we sometimes stumble into found family units, the film manages to stick a shaky landing nonetheless by the time its fifth and final three-minute chapter, “Living,” rolls around. Despite the film’s sometimes-misguided focus and its overlong runtime, Glasner’s dismissal of the nuclear family as an unrealistic aspiration in the modern age is clear and resounding, without engaging in pointless nihilism or crushing viewers beneath the weight of its subject matter. Creating a film that manages to treat such existentially terrifying themes with the same pathos and panache that “Dying” has is a rare treat these days — here’s to hoping that we’ll see more in this vein from Glasner in the future.
