How’s this for an opening shot. An old woman in distress on the floor in her nightie, shit down one of her legs; behind her an old guy jigging dementedly, naked beneath his open blue shirt, genitals flapping in the breeze. Dying (Sterben in its original German) is billed in some quarters as a black comedy. Brown might be closer to the mark. It’s a very, very dark colour either way. Find your jollies where you can with this one.
A companion piece to Michael Haneke’s Amour, maybe, it paints a bleak picture of old age, and follows the two oldsters, Lissy and Gerd – she still just about keeping up appearances, he completely shot away – and their messy end-of-life track towards the grave. Taking in, on the way, their grown-up kids, Tom a successful conductor, currently shepherding a a temperamental composer’s piece towards its debut. And Ellen, an alcoholic dental assistant currently embarking on an ill-advised relationship with her boss.
This is a film full of shock moments layered over a bed of terrible relationships. Tom’s life is an emotional mess – he’s having a baby with the ex of the touchy composer, but it’s not his baby, nor the composer’s. On top of that he’s having an affair with a member of the orchestra. Ellen is the sort of woman who goes out for a drink and wakes up in Latvia, the guy she went there with having fled the coop. Lissy, aghast at how old and incapable she’s suddenly become, is constantly fending off offers of help from Susanne, her neighbour, who’s only offering because she’s broke and hoping to get some sort of unofficial carer role.
There’s Gerd, too, barely aware of anything and surely heading towards death before the curtain falls.
This is also a film full of blunt-force moments designed to elicit a wince or yelp – songs in an off key. Here’s another scene. Tom and Lissy at her kitchen table. He rarely visits but here he is listening as his mother explains to him that she’s dying of cancer. Cancer of the vagina, she clarifies. “They are going to cut off my labia,” she shouts, before continuing with a painfully direct speech in which she says she never loved him, never even liked him.
There is more – a funeral which Tom is trying to attend but cannot because his electric car has run out of juice. A suicide attempt on Christmas Eve. Some terrible things with dentist’s drills and a dental assistant who’s half drunk. Not to mention the prickly relationship between Tom and Moritz, the baby’s biological father, a man very determined that everyone should understand that.
Inappropriate disjunctures? Or just the way life is, messy and Jerry Springer-esque? It’s almost unrelentingly grim and yet massively watchable. Novelistic, enveloping, thick and full and beautifully underplayed, the actors all avoiding the grand guignol or catastrophising.
Lars Eidinger is the most obvious name, as Tom. But it’s a fabulous cast all round – Lilith Stangenberg as the car-crash Ellen is particularly excellent, while the ever-reliable Ronald Zehrfeld plays the idiot dentist tangled up with her. Corinna Harfouch as Lissy is probably the best of all of them, as a woman hanging on for grim life, and her tiny scenes with the ever-hovering Susanne (Catherine Stoyan) are little demos of jousting powerplays.
Whether you laugh or not is down to your own sense of humour and how you react to being ram-raided by reality. There are no real jokes, just moments when the world appears to yaw away suddenly and shockingly. Dying is three hours long and it’s worth every minute.
Dying – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
