Dying: a compassionate tragicomedy about an orchestra conductor in crisis

Matthias Glasner’s Dying unfolds in five chapters and an epilogue, and the fourth of these chapters is entitled ‘Der Schmale Grat’ or ‘The Thin Line’. The line in question is the tightrope that artists walk between making work that is accessible to the masses while remaining steadfast in their pursuit of truth. Fail to hit that fine margin, composer Bernard Drinda (Robert Gwisdek) warns, and you’re left with nothing more than kitsch, which Bernard describes as the dismal result when “the feeling doesn’t reach to reality”.

The character of Bernard may be speaking for the writer-director, who spends three hours navigating a series of perilously thin lines and constantly reaching for a vivid sense of reality. When Glasner opens Dying on the sight of an old woman sitting in her own faeces while her husband wanders around half-naked and oblivious to her plight, the stage seems set for a pitiless examination of the indignities of old age, à la Amour (2012) or Vortex (2021), but his f ilm moves in unpredictable ways which reflect the complex and contradictory nature of these characters. Glasner finds comedy amid the tragedy, and pathos in the mess of life.

Glasner uses his first three chapters to introduce us to the dysfunctional and estranged Lunies family. The vulnerable elderly couple we meet in the opening scene are Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) and Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), although Bauer is credited as ‘My Father’ at the end of the film, indicating the deeply personal place that Glasner’s writing has emerged from. Lissy’s growing physical frailty and Gerd’s dementia have made it almost impossible for them to manage alone, but their two children are too busy dealing with their own considerable emotional baggage to support their parents.

Tom (Lars Eidinger) is a conductor who is helping his close friend Bernard prepare a symphony named Dying, but he divides most of his time between talking the depressed composer down from the brink of suicide and helping his ex-girlfriend raise another man’s child. Eidinger plays Tom as a man who has suffered a great deal of disappointment in his life and has learned to swallow his emotions, although they occasionally ripple up and break the surface of the actor’s exquisitely controlled performance. The film’s centrepiece is a conversation between Tom and his mother, which begins with Lissy revealing that she has terminal cancer and quickly unravels into a series of spiteful confessions, with years of resentment and bitterness on both sides spilling forth. The scene runs for around 15 minutes and the nuanced, pointed delivery that both actors bring to the table makes it mesmerising.

This conversation between two emotionally reserved characters is shot with a discomforting stillness, but elsewhere Dying has a more erratic quality. As Tom’s alcoholic sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg) careers from one disaster to the next, the film grows more wayward and fragmented, as if driven by her chaotic spirit. Many of the incidents that Ellen is involved in – from a spot of drunken dentistry to a watch-through-your-fingers fiasco at Bernard and Tom’s premiere – have a farcical quality, and though highly entertaining, they don’t cut as deeply as the film’s less manic moments. The more diffuse focus and a lack of clarity on how much time has elapsed between scenes can make it harder to grasp the emotional trajectory of these characters, particularly in Ellen’s relationship with Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld), even if the film remains incredibly absorbing on a moment-to-moment basis and its three hours zip by.

It is music that finally brings the strands of Dying together in a satisfying way, with Tom’s conducting of Bernard’s symphony creating a transcendent climax that seems to cathartically express so many unspoken emotions. Earlier in the film, Bernard (who again may be speaking on Glasner’s behalf ) tells his orchestra that transforming our deepest feelings into a piece of art that can speak to others is a hopeful act; and for all the sadness, pain and regret that Dying explores, Glasner’s film is ultimately a very hopeful one, even in the way he approaches death. The last of the three deaths that occur in the film is a suicide, a decision taken by someone who feels he has had enough of life and has said all he has to say, and in this moment Glasner captures an intimacy that is extremely moving to witness. From his compassionate perspective, death is seen as a release rather than a tragedy. For these characters, dying is the easy part, it’s living that’s hard.

► Dying is in UK cinemas 25 July.