23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Dying review: Even composers have the same family dramas as the rest of us
This time, it's the turn of the great Lars Eidinger (Clouds of Sils Maria, My Little Sister), whose character is the fulcrum for this novelistic family opus from German writer-director Matthias Glasner.
The Lunies clan are all having 'a time', as the euphemism goes. Matriarch Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) has both husband Gerd's (Hans-Uwe Bauer) dementia and her own ailments to negotiate, and neither son Tom (Eidinger) nor tear-away daughter Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) are much help.
Besides Tom's strained relationship with emotionally distant Lissy, he's learning the ropes as a father figure to another man's child, all the while trying to bring to life a new symphonic composition.
Chaotic Ellen, meanwhile, struggles to fit a burgeoning romance into her daily habit of booze and drugs.
Not a barrel of laughs, you'd be forgiven for thinking. And yet there is a bemusing buoyancy to Glasner's film that has your undivided attention throughout the vividly composed, brilliantly acted chapters of its three-hour runtime. A miracle.
