Tom Tykwer’s The Light

This is the Tykwer that gave us a remarkable shoot-out in the Guggenheim in The International (2009), but it’s also the Tykwer whose ear didn’t catch just how flatly that film’s clunky dialogue was falling. As Tim’s wife, Milena, Nicolette Krebitz struggles to make her blatantly expository lines come off naturally when she argues the case for her pet project, a community theater in Nairobi.

In The Light, the Tykwer who captured the electric buzz of post-Wall Berlin in Run Lola Run (1998) looks out on a city a little more settled in its ways now, a little more corporate, and a little less easy on the eyes—but still thrumming with multicultural life. As in Run Lola Run, there’s an animated sequence in The Light when Dio (Elyas Eldridge), Milena’s son from a previous lover, daydreams himself into the role of a superhero fighting to save his blended family. A lot more money went into Dio’s flight of fantasy, though that doesn’t necessarily make it more exciting than Lola’s.

Tykwer’s A Hologram for the King (2016) opens with Tom Hanks yapping through Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” and Dio has a song, too: Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” There are a few full-blown song-and-dance numbers in The Light, and while Tykwer never seems happier than when he’s directing what amounts to a music video, none of these tangents is a clean fit within the overall film. Eidinger’s in particular, in which Tim reasserts his manhood, is especially embarrassing.

The structure of Run Lola Run is essentially a video game played three times, and in The Light, Tim and Malena’s seventeen-year-old son, Jon (Julius Gause), immerses himself in a virtual world to play a game that serves as a tidy synecdoche for the storyline the film meanders along. In the opening scene, Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), a Syrian refugee who arrived in Berlin five years ago, reaffirms her belief that some souls, taken from the world of the living by surprise, need to be escorted into the next realm.

Farrah takes a job as a housekeeper in the Engels household. She replaces the family’s previous maid who, at the beginning of The Light, suffers a heart attack while cleaning her employers’ apartment and collapses alone. Outside the building, a food courier is hit by a truck whose hubcap rolls from the street to the kitchen floor, where the maid lies dying. Physically, that’s an impossible trek, but for whatever reason, Tykwer feels compelled to make the connection between two deaths in isolation.

Opening this year’s Berlinale, The Light is written and directed by the Tykwer who found himself on the same wavelength as Lana and Lilly Wachowski when they made Cloud Atlas (2012) together. He then went on to work with the Wachowskis again on Sense8 (2015), the Netflix series shot through with thrilling but also rather silly notions of woo-woo connectedness between all humans on the planet. Farrah sets out to unlock what binds each member of the Engels family within himself or herself. The hardest nut to crack is Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer), Jon’s twin sister.

Of all the Engels, Frieda clearly has the sharpest eye. She’s the first to actually see the dead maid on the floor after the body has spent the night undiscovered by Tim and Jon, who were too wrapped up in themselves to notice that something might be off. Frieda nails her father when she asks why he still dresses like “a leftist revolutionary” while working nine-to-five for an ad firm. Earlier, Tim lifts one of Frieda’s dinner table rants about the world her generation is inheriting to use—verbatim—as the text for one of his campaigns.

Farrah, a foreigner, an outsider—like Mary Poppins, but less twinkly—guides the Engels back to one another again. She has her motives, and she has her methods—which, as she eventually explains, are grounded in science. But Farrah harnesses them to lead herself and the Engels toward a moment of highly unscientific transcendence. It’s potentially magical if you buy into it, but if not, there’s all that directorial finesse to tide you over, sequence after sequence.