Dying

Matthias Glasner wrote Sterben after the deaths of both his parents, and it won him the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlinale in 2024. It runs three hours and is divided into chapters, each handing the film to a different member of the Lunies family, and it is as funny as it is unbearable — often in the same scene.

Corinna Harfouch plays Lissy, in the early stages of dementia and caring for a husband further along than she is; Lars Eidinger is her son Tom, a conductor rehearsing a friend's new composition in Berlin; Lilith Stangenberg is Ellen, a dental assistant whose drinking is beyond negotiation. The long central sequence in which mother and son finally talk — candidly, cruelly — is the reason the film exists, and Harfouch and Eidinger play it without a single soft landing.

German critics treated it as the best German film in years and it went on to a strong run at the Lolas. The comedy is what makes it survivable: Glasner has an ear for how families conduct their worst conversations in the most banal registers, and the film keeps finding absurdity in rooms where nothing funny should be happening.