‘The Light’ review: Tom Twyker’s Berlin opener is a murky meld of fantasy and drama

Dir. Tom Tykwer. Germany 2025. 162mins

Set primarily in Berlin, and directed by an internationally successful German auteur returning to base, The Light makes eminent sense as a Berlinale opener – not least as it embodies the spirit of serious-minded social responsibility that is traditionally this festival’s trademark. It hardly lacks ambition or technical dazzle, and the cast tackles this politically-themed braided-destinies drama with gusto. The film’s problem, however, is a confused mix of earnestness and self-importance, combined with a sometimes jarring stylistic flashiness. Local appeal, cinematic bravado and impeccably liberal themes bode well for box-office come the film’s German release in March, but it may struggle to travel beyond home turf. 

A confused mix of earnestness and self-importance 

The Light sees writer-director (and often, as here, co-composer) Tom Tykwer making his first German-language feature since 2010’s 3 – although since then, he has co-created the compellingly-tangled TV serial Babylon Berlin. Aiming for similar intricacy on a smaller scale, The Light brings together assorted characters from diverse backgrounds in the type of drama that was much in vogue at the turn of the century (Babel, Traffic, Paul Haggis’s Crash)

The central players are – as one character helpfully notes– members of “a typical dysfunctional German family”, the left-leaning faintly bohemian Engels clan. Milena (actor and director Nicolette Krebitz) is a development worker trying to finalise a stalled project to build a drama centre in Nairobi; her husband Tim (Lars Eidinger) is a PR man currently working on a glossy infomercial to promote social responsibility (Babylon Berlin’s Liv Lisa Fries appears as the face of the campaign). The couple has two 17-year-old children: sullen recluse Jon (Julius Gauser), permanently engrossed in an online VR game; and Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer), busy pursing club thrills while cautiously untangling her sexual identity. There is a fifth family member too, Milena’s young son Dio (Elyas Eldridge) from a liaison with a Kenyan man, Godfrey (Toby Onwumere).

A clever but shameless set-up montage sees the family’s Polish cleaner die just as an accident befalls a food delivery man… just as Milena suffers a bumpy flight from Kenya…  just as we twig who everyone is – the story’s constituent parts coming together not with a satisfying click but a groaning crunch of contrivance. Then enter key player Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), a Syrian refugee with a background in psychology who, for her own reasons, is only interested in working as a cleaner. She identifies the Engels family as the people who will help her complete her personal journey, and soon bonds with each member to salve their psychic wounds. 

Throughout, a recurring close-up of a water hourglass measures time drip by drip, rhyming thematically with the fact that the film’s Berlin setting is subject to a permanent downpour. Tykwer also intersperses several out-of-nowhere fantasy sequences: a number in which Milena, accompanied by a dance troupe, flashes through various versions of her identity (hippie, punk, bride, exec); an aerial ballet between Jon and a levitating cyperpunk girl; and an animation riff on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with Dio pointedly musing, “Is this the real life?”

For all its aspirations to weave a provocative, novelistically rich discourse about bourgeois complacency, the crisis of globalism, the decline of the European left and much else, The Light rarely feels anything other than cartoonishly literal in its lumbering parade of forced metaphors and hot-button themes, from the exploitation of gig economy workers to Gen-Z fluid sexuality. Just as Tim launches a campaign against social indifference, we cut to a solipsistic Frieda getting off her face in a club toilet – but of course, it’s her and her brother who soon rail against their parents’ blinkered entitlement. 

The film’s climactic sequence opens up Farrah’s back story and the horrific plight of desperate migrants – but in a way that depicts real-world horror on a discomforting, if not exploitative, level of cinematic spectacle. A bizarre mystical payoff only compounds the kitsch overstatement. There’s no denying the film’s noble intentions, but The Light sets about its mission with such showy extravagance that it ultimately comes across as an exercise in virtue-signalling as a multi-media three-ring circus. 

What the film does have in its favour is its ensemble cast, with Eidinger and Krebitz impressive as burned-out idealists who have become casualties of their own frazzled self-absorption. The simple domestic scenes play strongest: a shouting match between mother and daughter is a terrific playoff of timing and dynamics from Krebitz and Biesendorfer. Young Eldridge also lets rip with mischievous exuberance as Dio. 

Compelling in a more enclosed way is Al-Deen, who gives Farrah an aura of calm, still seriousness amid the frenzy. Even so, the role of the war-ravaged exile healing the troubled souls of the European bourgeoisie rather comes across as a variant on the much-critiqued narrative trope known as the ‘Magical Negro’ – here, the Magical Syrian, with her own techno-mystical arsenal of flickering gadgetry.