Tom Tykwer's film "The Light", which opened the recent Berlinale and has now hit theaters, resembles Pier Pasolini's film "Teorema – Geometry of Love" (1968) in some ways. In Pasolini's film, a young man, referred to as "Guest", enters a Milanese industrialist family, destroys their bourgeois facades, and awakens each of the members in different ways, bringing their previous lives to an end. The Catholic Marxist Pasolini, with his erotic penchant for the proletarian ragazzo, destabilized class relationships. The narrative, the constellation of characters, and the thesis-like nature of the parable—these elements are now also found in Tom Tykwer.

One will soon count "The Light" among the handful of Berlin films that also raise a societal diagnosis, represent a snapshot of the times, or even mean a "historical marker" (Helmut Lethen). Films like Fritz Lang's "M", which cast a coordinate grid over the metropolis in 1931 and depicts a harbinger of impending doom; Wim Wenders, who in 1987 permanently captured the divided city and the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz as an error. Finally, Tykwer himself, who ten years later in "Run Lola Run" collages the euphoria and chaos of upheaval and continues to reference Fritz Lang backward in his ongoing series "Babylon Berlin" to this day.

Since "Run Lola Run", we have moved forward a quarter of a century. Berlin is a wetland and symbolically, if one wishes to be biblical, represents the approaching flood, the downfall, human culpability. "Dance of Death" is somewhere written above a street or the highway ring on concrete. Every day no future. It rains and rains and rains incessantly, as if the present is being softened by the science fiction of the future. Tom Tykwer doesn't deal in small change, but instead goes all out and tackles big themes.

"We are a typical German dysfunctional family": Thus we hear from one of its four members about the Engels, with the otherworldly Wenders personnel of the male messengers Damiel and Cassiel also resonating in names. Upper middle class, discreetly deprived of wealth and emotionally disturbed. Like no other actor, Lars Eidinger can embody the softness and wretchedness of this type of man, whose contours and essence seem to melt away as if they were made of butter. Marital disputes and existential questions between Milena (Nicolette Krebitz), who is committed to Africa, and the advertising agency guy and PR consultant Tim Engels, as well as the disengagement of the teenagers Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer), an environmental activist, and Jon (Julius Gause), the gamer, from the crumbling cohesion.

This vacuum is filled by the new housekeeper, the Syrian Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), equipped with supernatural powers, a therapeutic toolkit, and her own burden of fate. That she has the role of not just a consciousness-altering light bringer is conveyed – as expected from the image maker and cineaste Tykwer – through the opening camera movement impressively and appropriately grandiose. What follows is a fantasy of redemption, offerings for the soul. And a bit of abracadabra for academics.

But, this is also true, the almost three-hour film dances, flies, and sings, among other things, to the leitmotif of the Queen evergreen "Bohemian Rhapsody," plunging headfirst into the adventures of the eye and performing technical and visual acrobatics, as if Berlin were part of La La Land. However, the magic does not last.

Just as Milena is in public service for development aid, the acute romantic Tykwer works as a development aid to "radiate" our hearts and minds and tackle the issues of climate and future crisis, migration, globalization, and an aging society. Even in his profound probing, he is close to the spirit of Wim Wenders. Both do not benefit from this for their film narratives. Both save themselves from it with their visual power, which is capable of rising above the heavy and dispelling false grandeur – light as light.

"The Light", directed by Tom Tykwer, D 2025, 162 min.