24-07-2025
Dying review — perfectly pitched gallows humour from Das Boot director
Calling your three-hour German epic Dying is a punchy statement but at least it weeds out the non-hardcore. To paraphrase Bette Davis on the subject of old age, Dying is not for sissies.
Best known for the TV hit Das Boot, the director Matthias Glasner's first feature in 12 years is an absorbing, intricate, multi-perspective portrait of the dysfunctional Lunies family. It starts with a middle-class couple not enjoying their golden years. We meet the 70-year-old Lissy Lunies (Corinna Harfouch) slumped on the floor, covered in faeces and unable to move. Meanwhile her husband, Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), who has dementia, wanders over to the neighbours' house naked, clearly not for the first time. Lissy has terminal cancer and is almost blind from diabetes. They seem not to have friends and their middle-aged children barely pick up the phone, let alone visit. Quite why this is the case becomes clear later on.
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Their son, Tom (Lars Eidinger), a busy Berlin-based conductor, is preoccupied with the premiere of a symphony called Dying, composed by his friend (Robert Gwisdek) who is chronically depressed. He is also determined to be a stepfather to the new baby girl of his ex-partner (Anna Bederke). Meanwhile Tom's alcoholic sister, Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), a thermonuclear hot mess, has lurched into an affair with a married dentist (Ronald Zehrfeld).
Abortion, domestic abuse, suicide and some wince-inducing dentistry also feature, yet for all the depressing subject matter Dying is far from a depressing experience. Partly that's because of some nuanced performances — an extraordinary scene where Lissy tells Tom she never loved him is worthy of its own award — but mainly it's because it never wallows. With the dedication 'For my family. The living and the dead', this isn't misery porn, it's unsentimental realism shot through with perfectly pitched gallows humour.
18, 182min
★★★★☆
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