This review is part of Blitz’s continued coverage of the 71st Sydney Film Festival, 5-16 June. Read the rest of our reviews here.  

Matthias Glasner’s Dying (2024) feels a little like Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinertjoins’ Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), with both telling a heartwarming contemporary family story, creating a symphony of emotions as you are taken on a journey through life in a multigenerational dysfunctional family. Dying makes you consider the profound influences of every individual in your life, as you contemplate how you should communicate with your ageing family and loved ones, while you still can.  

The film centres on inseparable human emotions and the fine chasm between the dying and the living. 

“There is a realm between the living and the dead. What unites them is love.”  

Via FILMGRAB 

The film follows Tom Lunies as he navigates the chaos and indignities of life: dealing with the progressive cognitive decline of his father (Gerd), the complexities of fatherhood when his ex girlfriend wants him to co-parent the child fathered by another man, and managing suffocating workplace demands when he clashes with his talented but increasingly unstable friend (Bernard), who composed the music dying, the piece Tom is conducting. To review this film as merely making me reconsider living, though, would not entirely do it justice.  

Divided into several parts, the film begins through the eyes of Lissy Lunies, Tom’s mum. Amid moments of comedic brilliance, like stopping more than 20m ahead of a child crossing the road with Gerd directing and Lissy driving, lies a sobering undertone of the strain in their marriage as Gerd battles Parkinson's Disease, functional decline, and no longer remembers his wife. After Gerd dies, the mother and son interaction becomes increasingly suffocating, as Tom learns truths about his family and growing up years that leave him never looking at things the same way. These scenes, though seemingly foreign, evoke a strange familiarity, even in families that appear completely functional, normal and free of problems. Any individual wouldn’t help but relate to a certain degree of dissonance within their closest relationships.