Director: Charly Hübner (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
The roof of a railway station. You can tell it’s in Berlin as you can see the television tower shining in the background. If you know the area, you can tell it’s Gesundbrunnen station, quite close to where I live, but that’s not really germane to the plot. A grey haired woman opens an Imbiss, a container that’s usually used to sell takeaway food. It has the name Michaela’s on the top,rather like a seedy club. There is no food on sale – instead we see an ethereal white light.
Streams of people march towards the lit container on which a number of religious ornaments has been placed by the woman, presumably the eponymous Michaela. The people literally come from nowhere – we see them emerging out of nothing. Each picks up a small book, handed to them by Michaela. One, a very tall man in a dark suit, arrives late. As she hands him his book, he opens it to show a photo that will be familiar to anyone who has seen any of the Kangaroo Chronicle films.
Dimitrij Schaad has only been in a handful of films and he already has a typecasting problem. He just looks like the slacker hero of the two films he starred in based on Marc-Uwe King’s comic novels. Fortunately, his range isn’t tested in this film where he’s required to play a slacker hero. Reiner is some sort of care assistant who generally just shambles through life. He has a 7-year old estranged son, and you can bet he isn’t regular on his maintenance payments.
We first see Reiner pushing an old woman with a wheelchair through one of the more picturesque areas of Kreuzberg. When they’re done, she places a small toy giraffe in his hand. Her returns home and soon, the doorbell rings. It’s 3 young female Jehovah’s Witnesses. Once he’s got rid of them, saying that he only prays for football results, Reiner returns into his run down flat. Before long the doorbell rings again. This time it’s Morten, the tall man in black from the opening scene.
Morten introduces himself as Reiner’s Death – not Death, he wouldn’t presume to come for everyone. But he has come to take Reiner to the Other Side. When asked, he can’t say what its like on the Other Side, as he’s just the transporter. He’s never been there himself. All he knows is that Reiner has 3 minutes to collect his thoughts and then they must go. Reiner promptly uses most of these 3 minutes asking trivial questions. And then the doorbell rings again.
This time it’s Sophia, Reiner’s ex, who’s there to take him to visit his mother for her birthday, something about which he has naturally forgotten. Now Reiner has got a second person urging him to get his stuff together and immediately leave his flat. Yet for reasons of Plot, Sophia’s appearance means that Morten has exceeded the 3 minutes he has to take Reiner. This puts Reiner into pre-Death limbo, and Morten must accompany him until … something or other.
The rest of the film consists, first of Reiner, Sophia and Morten trying to get to mum’s house in deepest North Germany, then what they do when they get there – which to be honest isn’t much at all. Reiner misses a tram, then rushes to get on at the next stop, their train is cancelled but they hop on the Polish train instead. A second agent of death appears, apparently to finish off the job that Morten has botched, and the two Deaths tussle with each other in the rain.
It’s all very whimsical, and although it doesn’t add up to too much, the people we accompany are pleasant enough. You can understand both why Sophia is no longer with Reiner any more, and why they briefly get back together. Reiner has the air of a desperate dad – not least in the desperate postcards with pretty cartoons that he sends to his son Johnny. He’s the sort of person who is amiable company in a film but would be impossible to have a serious relationship with.
Sophia, der Tod und Ich is the directing fiction debut of Charlie Hübner, a ubiquitous German actor whose speciality is slightly overweight ordinary men. True to form here, he has a small role here, playing a bar/guest house proprietor, who insists that Reiner and Morten take one double room, and Sophia and Reiner’s mother take the other, but is quite happy to later rent out a third room for mythical “guests who’ll join us later” so that Reiner and Sophia can have make up sex.
It’s not that easy to say what the film is actually about. Its a sort of road movie, where the trip is more important than the destination, and it’s a comedy, albeit one with few laugh out loud moments. It is certainly very odd. I found it pretty incoherent in parts, and a little unsure of what it wanted to say, although this is a thousand times better than a high budget formulaic piece which is indistinguishable from any number of films falling the same formula.
After the magic realist opening, Sophia, der Tod und Ich quite quirky becomes something which is much more relatable, and – you must say – less adventurous. In many ways. It’s a film which reflects its director, who can always be relied upon to put in a performance of someone who is likeable, if not particularly memorable. It was pleasant enough while it lasted, and I was happy enough to spend some time in it’s company, but after I left the cinema, very little lingered with me.
Go and see this film, it’s perfectly fine. But that’s pretty much all it is. Apart from the soundtrack which, like the rest of the film, is enjoyable as the film runs, but I couldn’t repeat a single tune that I heard.
CinePhil 