Ghost Song: A fleshed-out and full-blooded portrayal of youthful amour fou

• Reviewed from the 2026 San Sebastián Film Festival. 

A sort of Gen Z, Hamburg-set variation on Wings of Desire (1987), Fatih Akin’s Ghost Song is an ambitious, striking and largely persuasive metaphysical romance. Co-written with Ruth Tomas, it’s Akin’s first time in competition at a prominent film-festival – San Sebastian – since 2019’s grand-guignol serial-killer drama The Golden Glove (2019) shocked audiences at the Berlinale.

Akin – whose earlier works won major prizes at Berlin (Head On, Golden Bear 2004), Venice and Cannes – has since delivered two unexpectedly commercial hits in Germany via contrasting biographical dramas: Rheingold (2022), a terrifically compelling mid-2000s crime/rap saga, and Amrum (2025), a sea-swept mid-1940s coming-of-ager.

Ghost Song sees Akin return to the present and go home to Hamburg, here presented in infinitely more alluring fashion than The Golden Glove’s über-scuzzy depiction of Reeperbahn. Acclaimed cinematographer Frank Griebe’s widescreen vistas endow locations, especially at night, with world-city grandeur – the Heinrich Hertz Tower (known as ‘Telemichel’) fulfilling a similar function to the Victory Column in Wim Wenders’ 1987 classic.

Telemichel’s panoramic observation-deck is where tousle-haired Faris (Eren M. Güvercin) encounters vivacious, headscarf-wearing Syrian refugee Farasha (newcomer Mariam Dawoud) at a graduation party. Both are 20 and into physics; their instant-soulmate status economically conveyed by simple, near-silent, screen-filling close-ups as they exchange looks a crowded lift.

Romantic passion buds rapidly — only to be interrupted when, the very same night, tragedy strikes. But even death is insufficient to keep the protagonists apart: the ‘late’ Farasha, who survives in spirit form, finds she can interact with Faris when he dreams (but only for 40 days, the traditional mourning period of Muslim communities). This temporarily enables what is wryly dubbed a “long-distance relationship,” appealingly incarnated by the leads.

The version shown in San Sebastian is mainly black-and-white, with colour deployed for elaborate chapter-headings and for the final section. But Akin has also overseen a colour-only version; the 16-25s (in Germany and further afield) who comprise the target audience could well be attracted by the chance to compare both.

Perhaps a touch kitschy in its latter stages, Ghost Song manages to find a certain distinctive groove via the absorbing visuals and a soundtrack which blends middle-eastern-coded beats and electro/techno stylings — this aspect serving to subtly illustrate Farasha’s dynamically evolving interpretations of her Islamic faith.

While as pleasingly matter-of-fact in terms of supernatural practicalities as Alexandre Koberidze’s Georgian/German What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), Ghost Song takes its temperature-cues from the youthful amour fou shared by Faris and Farasha – fleshed-out and full-blooded, despite the absence of traditional corporeality.