WARNING: SPOILERS!

Yesterday I had the fortune and the misfortune of watching, by myself, the depressing and mesmerising German film Dying (Sterben).

I had watched the trailer a couple of weeks ago and got intrigued. I read the FT review (5 stars out of 5) this weekend. I knew very well it would be hard, 10 days after my father has passed away, but I felt like I had to see it. Especially now.

The film is about a dysfunctional family of four: a father (Gerd) with a dementia that resembles LBD, a mother (Lissy) with cancer trying to take care of him and failing, a son (Tom) who is up to his neck with his own troubles, and an alcohol addict daughter (Ellen) dating a man married with children. To add to the existing troubles, Tom’s ex is having a baby but she is ambivalent about the biological father so Tom is helping out starting with the birth, Lissy and Gerd are running out of money and are too proud to ask for it, Ellen finds herself waking up in strangers’ beds and does not know what country she is in.

As I watched breathlessly for 3 hours, more than once, I felt a jolt that made me jump in my seat. As if the script is not gruelling enough the evil director (Matthias Glasner) shot some of Ellen’s scenes over dental operations involving drills, dental aspirators, and unsanitised workman’s pliers. Her illicit affair is consummated with bloody kisses.

The character who ties the film together is Tom, sheepishly running from scene to scene trying to manage the next crisis with an ironic wool hat that has “Don’t Panic” written on it. The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw dons him “emotionally withdrawn” which to me is a personal issue, I would be way more withdrawn if I were in his shoes. Bradshaw also calls the film a black comedy, more black than comedy if you ask me. But to be fair, Tom’s idea of a Christmas evening is watching a 3 hour long Ingmar Bergman film about two siblings in an abusive family which could be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Curiously, the film is not named after the dying father Gerd, but after Tom’s friend Bernard’s composition which Tom is conducting, played by a youth orchestra abused by Bernard.

The orchestral sessions provide a summary: providing an anti-climax with a haunting minimalistic melody, cello soloist (aptly named Mi-Do) delivering the final touch. Tom trying hard and failing, Bernard being against everything including what’s in his head trying to cross the “thin line” between being an artist and being understood. Ellen ruining it when it matters most, and the parents oblivious to it all.

Gerd, Ellen, Tom, Lissy, but especially Bernard are excellent casting. Bernard looks so much like Dostoevsky that it would have been a shame if things turned out well for him in the end.

I’m still trying to understand why (masochistically) I liked the film so much. I guess a lot of the feelings I had during the 3 hours were echoes of what I had been feeling in the past 3 years: the sadness, the helplessness, the guilt, the anger, the cringing, the shame…

And pain. The characters in the film deal with it in various ways: by building a cold wall around themselves, by overworking, by blaming life, by selflessly helping others, by drinking, by avoiding the truth, by feeling guilty and pacifying themselves. All of which do little to alleviate the pain yet cause further pain for the people around them, like cancerous tissue.

Watching Dying was feeling what I have been feeling, experiencing it all one more time with Tom, Ellen, and Lissy. This is perhaps a Buddhist way to cope with pain: life is sometimes hard, but pain just like joy is impermanent and lightens when we allow it to do what it is supposed to do.

I think Dying helped me through pain, that’s why I enjoyed it. I felt numb perhaps for a few hours after I left the theatre. Forest bathing in the park and talking to loved ones cured it, a bit. This emotional roller coaster is what good art is supposed feel like, right? In the end after I got home, again alone, I was able to sleep deeply and recover. A bit.