You will forgive us for thinking that we might need to sell this film as worth your while watching - why should you invest three hours of your life watching a light comedy from Germany about dying? ‘
Unabashedly sporting the most inauspicious of titles, a three-hour running time and a logline that features terminally ill elders and self-destructive descendants...And yet writer-director Matthias Glasner’s crisscrossing family drama manages to be exceedingly funny, often in some of its darkest moments, as well as expectedly sad’ - Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter.
So, maybe you might get some good laughs here; and what else? It ‘is full of glorious contradictions, many of which occur within the same conversation - such as a gripping centrepiece interaction between Tom and his mother over tea and cake that runs the full gamut from love and confessional to repulsion and back again. Glasner isn’t scared to let things become talky - and won a deserved Silver Bear in Berlin for the script - but he also films the lengthy passages of orchestra music in ways that become equally engrossing’ - Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film.
Centring, then, on Tom, an orchestra conductor and his family, all with complicated lives… this is a rich, cacophony of stories presented in chapters throughout the film.
‘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’ - Hilary White, Irish Independent.
I hope you are convinced! See you there.
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