‘The Light’ review: Tom Tykwer’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 profitable German auteur returning to base, The Mild makes eminent sense as a Berlinale opener – not least because it embodies the spirit of serious-minded social accountability that’s historically this pageant’s trademark. It hardly lacks ambition or technical dazzle, and the solid tackles this politically-themed braided-destinies drama with gusto. The movie’s downside, nevertheless, is a confused mixture of earnestness and self-importance, mixed with a typically jarring stylistic flashiness. Native enchantment, cinematic bravado and impeccably liberal themes bode nicely for box-office come the movie’s German launch in March, however it could battle to journey past residence turf. 

A confused mixture of earnestness and self-importance 

The Mild sees writer-director (and infrequently, as right here, co-composer) Tom Tykwer making his first German-language characteristic since 2010’s 3 – though since then, he has co-created the compellingly-tangled TV serial Babylon Berlin. Aiming for comparable intricacy on a smaller scale, The Mild brings collectively assorted characters from various backgrounds in the kind of drama that was a lot in vogue on the flip of the century (Babel, Site visitors, Paul Haggis’s Crash)

The central gamers are – as one character helpfully notes– members of “a typical dysfunctional German household”, the left-leaning faintly bohemian Engels clan. Milena (actor and director Nicolette Krebitz) is a improvement employee attempting to finalise a stalled challenge to construct a drama centre in Nairobi; her husband Tim (Lars Eidinger) is a PR man at the moment engaged on a shiny infomercial to advertise social accountability (Babylon Berlin’s Liv Lisa Fries seems because the face of the marketing campaign). The couple has two 17-year-old youngsters: sullen recluse Jon (Julius Gauser), completely engrossed in an internet VR sport; and Frieda (Elke Biesendorfer), busy pursing membership thrills whereas cautiously untangling her sexual id. There’s a fifth member of the family too, Milena’s younger son Dio (Elyas Eldridge) from a liaison with a Kenyan man, Godfrey (Toby Onwumere).

A intelligent however shameless set-up montage sees the household’s Polish cleaner die simply as an accident befalls a meals supply man… simply as Milena suffers a bumpy flight from Kenya…  simply as we twig who everyone seems to be – the story’s constituent components coming collectively not with a satisfying click on however a groaning crunch of contrivance. Then enter key participant Farrah (Tala Al-Deen), a Syrian refugee with a background in psychology who, for her personal causes, is barely desirous about working as a cleaner. She identifies the Engels household because the individuals who will assist her full her private journey, and shortly bonds with every member to salve their psychic wounds. 

All through, a recurring close-up of a water hourglass measures time drip by drip, rhyming thematically with the truth that the movie’s Berlin setting is topic to a everlasting downpour. Tykwer additionally intersperses a number of out-of-nowhere fantasy sequences: a quantity wherein Milena, accompanied by a dance troupe, flashes via numerous variations of her id (hippie, punk, bride, exec); an aerial ballet between Jon and a levitating cyperpunk lady; and an animation riff on ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with Dio pointedly musing, “Is that this the actual life?”

For all its aspirations to weave a provocative, novelistically wealthy discourse about bourgeois complacency, the disaster of globalism, the decline of the European left and far else, The Mild hardly ever feels something aside from cartoonishly literal in its lumbering parade of pressured metaphors and hot-button themes, from the exploitation of gig economic system staff to Gen-Z fluid sexuality. Simply as Tim launches a marketing campaign in opposition to social indifference, we reduce to a solipsistic Frieda getting off her face in a membership rest room – however after all, it’s her and her brother who quickly rail in opposition to their dad and mom’ blinkered entitlement. 

The movie’s climactic sequence opens up Farrah’s again story and the horrific plight of determined migrants – however in a method that depicts real-world horror on a discomforting, if not exploitative, degree of cinematic spectacle. A weird mystical payoff solely compounds the kitsch overstatement. There’s no denying the movie’s noble intentions, however The Mild units about its mission with such showy extravagance that it in the end comes throughout as an train in virtue-signalling as a multi-media three-ring circus. 

What the movie does have in its favour is its ensemble solid, with Eidinger and Krebitz spectacular as burned-out idealists who’ve turn into casualties of their very own frazzled self-absorption. The easy home scenes play strongest: a shouting match between mom and daughter is a terrific playoff of timing and dynamics from Krebitz and Biesendorfer. Younger Eldridge additionally lets rip with mischievous exuberance as Dio. 

Compelling in a extra enclosed method is Al-Deen, who offers Farrah an aura of calm, nonetheless seriousness amid the frenzy. Even so, the position of the war-ravaged exile therapeutic the troubled souls of the European bourgeoisie quite comes throughout as a variant on the much-critiqued narrative trope referred to as the ‘Magical Negro’ – right here, the Magical Syrian, along with her personal techno-mystical arsenal of flickering gadgetry.