Over three hours and 5 totally different chapters, Matthias Glasner’s “Dying” chronicles the travails of an estranged household of 4: an aged couple on the point of dying, their profitable composer son and their alcoholic, ne’er-do-well daughter. The movie casts a large internet over their experiences, and each main efficiency is as impeccable because the final. Nonetheless, Glasner’s formal rigidity prevents their tales from feeling intrinsically certain, leaving every of them with little to say.

The movie opens within the German countryside with aged couple Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) and Gerd Lunies (Hans-Uwe Bauer) being discovered helpless by a neighbor. Lissy’s litany of illnesses render her solely semi-mobile, and he or she usually ends the day by soiling herself, whereas Gerd’s dementia leads him to wander bare into individuals’s properties. They’ll’t assist one another, and their grownup kids are too preoccupied with their very own metropolitan lives to get entangled.

Whereas the premise verges on distress “distress porn” (different works about helpless older {couples} like Michael Haneke’s “Amour” and Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex” come to thoughts), Glasner takes a wry and frank strategy to those indignities. He frames them not solely as inevitable, however acquainted — as an illustration, Lissy’s intense embarrassment and her rankled responses to well-meaning serving to palms.

As Lissy wrestles with putting Gerd in an assisted dwelling facility, “Dying” comes achingly near probing the fears of dying (and of dying alone) that preserve hovering in its margins. Nonetheless, as soon as it switches focus to their middle-aged son Tom (Lars Eidinger), the film’s basis begins to rattle. Tom, the pseudo-stepfather to his ex’s child with one other man, is deep within the means of perfecting an orchestral piece known as “Sterben” (“Dying”) written by his outdated buddy and uneasy collaborator Bernard (Robert Gwisdek), although his younger musicians don’t appear to know its nuances.

The musicians’ conversations and debates on dying result in new methods of expressing and performing, however in these moments, the movie’s self-reflexivity begins to stagnate, as Glasner and cinematographer Jakub Bejnarowicz seldom match this sense of inventive transformation with visible evolution of their very own. To cite a critic of Tom’s orchestral conducting within the movie, “The entire thing is a big banality.” This explicit criticism seems late within the movie as a little bit of tongue-in-cheek lamp shading, as if the film have been defending itself, however this intuition in direction of self-preservation is a part of its drawback. “Dying” is usually too protected and too hermetically sealed to make an actual emotional affect, regardless of the caliber of performances at play.

As Gerd, Bauer shuffles confusedly between hallways and embodies a tragically lonely physicality, one which appears to be reaching out for recognition or understanding. Simply as tragic as his lack of understanding is the best way his eyes briefly mild up when Tom makes a fleeting go to, affording Eidinger the prospect to embody a burdened stillness, as if he have been at a loss for solutions. His dynamic with Harfouch is simply as alluring, not solely as a superb stroke of casting (Tom and Lissy seem like mirror photos of each other), however as a doorway to some hilariously weird discomforts, because the looming specter of mortality offers strategy to frankness and admissions of remorse.

Nonetheless, Glasner’s stilted visible strategy sadly goes hand-in-hand with stilted writing. The dialogue is usually snappy (Harfouch particularly delivers it with a pointy tongue), however the moments the place “Dying” is ready to convey a way of lived historical past between the characters are few and much between. Within the course of, spoken phrases change into the film’s crutch, particularly when the fourth key member of the family is launched: Tom’s sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), an beginner singer and wayward dental assistant having an affair together with her employer, Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld).

On its face, the booze-soaked romance between the 2 is maybe the closest the film involves feeling emotionally vibrant or aesthetically affecting — the digicam matches the actors’ temper, their motion and their power — however the lack of significant connection between Ellen and her household is one thing the film isn’t in a position to totally convey or deftly dramatize. Stangenberg is immensely dedicated, as a younger lady misplaced down a gap of her habit and isolation, however she belongs to a special film totally, with its personal distinct rhythms. Reasonably than matching the pitch of the opposite chapters, the movie’s Ellen segments are little greater than an appendix.

These disparate chapters are frivolously linked by emotions of isolation and fears of by no means discovering closure or reconciliation. Nonetheless, to imbue the story as a complete with these emotions — absent any kind of problem, subversion or rumination — leaves it weak to the very criticisms of banality that appear to be on Glasner’s thoughts and on the tip of the film’s tongue. If there’s any reflection or revelation to be discovered, it’s that the connective tissue between varied threads includes cellphone calls that learn in another way as soon as the movie revisits them from one other character’s perspective. However past this minor trick of perspective, there’s little that’s actually cinematic about “Dying,” a movie of exceptional efficiency and subject material, laid low by unremarkable filmmaking.