“It was like jumping off a cliff together”: Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch and Matthias Glasner on Dying at Berlinale 2024

With a high-profile German film at the highest-profile film festival in Germany, it’s hardly surprising that everyone involved in Sterben wanted to be at the press conference to launch the film at the 2024 Berlinale. The stage could barely accommodate the key cast and crew, and everyone else had to be content sitting in the audience (albeit in the velvet rope-segregated VIP area). The film details the dysfunctional Lunies family, whose already weak bonds threaten to snap as the family comes together in the face of illness – assuming everyone actually shows up.

For director Matthias Glasner, the origins of the feature were extremely personal, and it seemed like making it was therapeutic. “The movie was born at the very moment my parents died within a relatively short time frame, but after a very long process of suffering. And then shortly afterwards, my first daughter was born, and I was really exhausted. I was tired and I was very unhappy about many things, and the way I deal with these things is that I’m looking for free spaces, creative spaces so that I can write, you know? For me, working is a bit of taking a holiday, and if you’ve got children you know that working is far less demanding than taking care of your children.”

The director continued, “So I started writing about my mother, I wanted to do a short film about my mother, but then it started growing – and I started thinking about the relationship we had, me and my mother, and then I started thinking about more and more, and everything – including the question of why we are who we are, and why we make the decisions we’re making, and why we’re actually not deciding according to what we wanted; why we didn’t become the people we one day imagined we would be.“

Lars Eidinger has presented films at Berlinale so many times, he’s practically part of the (stylish) furniture, and was a member of the festival’s international jury in 2016, under the stewardship of jury president Meryl Streep. Eidinger plays Tom, the son of the family who wrestles with his duties as the conductor of a new composition, as well as being a surrogate father to the baby his ex had with another man.

The German actor was asked about how some of the first reviews for the film described his character as cold.  “And yes, I read that – that people said he was cold, but had I prepared, I might have said, ‘Okay, this is my task now – to play someone who is acting coldly.’ You know, in those scenes, I’ve realised that I was rather emotional, and it felt rather warm and that was a nice contradiction, a nice ambivalence, and I never planned for that. I would never enter into a scene saying, ‘Okay, after that phrase it would be great for me to shed some tears,’ it just happens, when I’m exposed to the scene, or when I really accept the situation, the encounter.”

For Eidinger, a scene in which he and his onscreen mother (played by Corinna Harfouch) sit around the table and heave harsh home truths at each other was a standout (and it’s deliciously brutal). “When thinking of the scene with Corinna and myself, that was a scene of 20, or 24 minutes even, and we just shot that right away without rehearsing it, and I don’t know, but I had the impression when we watched the film that quite a bit of that scene was from the first take – this first encounter,” he explains. “I remember, and it may sound stupid, but let me explain it. When we were done playing, or acting, rather, Corinna high-fived me. I know Corinna very well, we’ve worked alongside each other quite a few times, and this is not the way she normally reacts. This was rather a strange gesture for her, but I understood it was like jumping off a cliff together, hitting the ground together, and you just congratulate each other for daring to do that because you never knew what was going to happen.”

His onscreen mother agreed, with Harfouch saying, “Here, in the scene, the strong part of it is that these two people, unlike in other stories about relationships, people always talk about how people are not able to talk to each other, how people can’t really open their mouth to speak with each other, the camera’s focussing on people who don’t dare to speak to each other, things have been haltingly progressing, and we’re looking at it from the outside, and you as a viewer; well, at least that’s my feeling now, when I have watched these things, you feel like you’ll get frozen too. But these two people, strangely enough, somehow manage to tell each other these things that are so, not just unpleasant, but extraordinary as well. But they manage to just tell each other these things, and talk about these things, and I found that so unusual.”

Lilith Stangenberg plays Ellen, the younger sibling, who handles her alienation by numbing it with a drug and alcohol-induced slow-motion self-destruction. For the actress, the addictive personality of her character was key to her performance. “I tried to actually look into what is behind the urge to get a buzz, to be drunk, what makes people do that. I think there’s kind of an inner urge, a kind of an inner necessity, to trick the laws of your everyday life, to reject these everyday rules. But at the same time, I think that this speaks to a longing to overstep boundaries. Perhaps to even dissolve, perhaps there’s even a longing for death hidden somewhere, that there are certain feelings, certain fears, certain inhibitions that you might have, that you’ll just kill off – at least for a short time – when you’re in ecstasy, when you get that buzz, when you get drunk.”

The film premiered at the Berlinale Palast, literally across the street from the Berlin Philharmonic, where Eidinger shot a number of scenes in which his character conducts a youth orchestra. Eidinger spoke about how he prepared for this aspect of his performance, and how some aspects don’t need much preparation at all. “The way that I see my profession, or how I approach things; I mean, this is the result of all the experiences I managed to make and collect over time. I realised, and I’m not just referring to the role of the conductor, and also all the other scenes where I’m not conducting, I’m trying to prepare as little as possible, and I just try to be as open-minded as possible when going through the day and into scenes and to be as open as I can when interacting with my partners,” he said.

Oliver Johnston

Dying does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.

Watch a clip for Dying here: