In die Sonne schauen

So this is the german movie for the Oscars 2026. I hope the Academy is not dazzled by the award this production received at the Cannes Film Festival. It contains only trace elements of a plot, has a runtime of two and a half hours which is far too long, and bores its audience to unbearable levels. After 20 minutes, I looked at the clock for the first time and thought: Oh dear, and I have to endure this for more than two hours. Several people in our cinema left early. They had had enough of the missing dialogues and the constantly similar monologues. The protagonists share something morbid, a kind of death wish. Unfortunately, this totally overrated, not recommendable film is only boring to death.

There exists a new form of asceticism in cinema, one that practices not restraint, but excess. It drowns the viewer in a deluge of stimuli, hoping the excess of form might conceal the vacuity of its content. One leaves the cinema not with a thought or a feeling, but with a kind of physical exhaustion, as if one had just undertaken an arduous journey without remembering its destination. "Looking into the Sun" is the gleaming, feverish manifesto of this new school, a film presented to its audience as an ordeal.

It is precisely in its strongest moments that the film reveals its decisive weakness. It is, as the benevolent cineaste would call it, a profoundly sensory experience. One does not go to this film; one enters it. You feel the shimmering ozone before a summer thunderstorm, the scratch of a woolen sweater on bare skin, the cool oblivion in the water of a lake. It is a cinematic barefoot path, leading us over shards of beauty, through the mire of repressed memories, and across the moss of comforting moments. The camera clings to surfaces, it breathes textures, it renders sight an almost haptic affair. In these moments, the film is magnificent because it desires nothing more than to place us in a state, a pure, unmediated presence.

Yet this state is fleeting, and what remains is the suffocating pretension with which each of these moments is charged. "Looking into the Sun" is a film so enamored with its own artistry that it forgets to possess a soul. Every shot is a painting, to be sure, but one that arrives already furnished with its own catalog text and art-historical classification. In every pan, in every deliberately unconventional composition, one feels the trembling index finger of the director, whispering in our ear: "Behold, how profound. Feel, how authentic." This intrusive staging of the significant suffocates any possible genuine sentiment at its inception. What was intended as meditation curdles into a pose.

Thus, the work meanders through associative sequences of images that adhere more to a curated Instagram feed than to any dramaturgical necessity. It is a fever dream, yes, but not the authentic kind that befalls us in delirium, revealing truths inaccessible to the conscious mind. It is the contrived, the artificially induced intoxication, in which one can still feel the breath of the pharmacist on one's neck. The images cry out for interpretation but are, in the end, merely empty ciphers basking in the reflection of their own supposed profundity.

In the end, we are left with the paradox of a film that wants us to feel everything, yet leaves us strangely untouched. One has felt the sun, but perceived no warmth. One has seen the pain, but felt no compassion. On this barefoot path, one has indeed felt every stone, but the destination was merely another meticulously lit dead end. "Looking into the Sun" wants to teach us how to see, yet is itself blind to the simple truth that art is born not of intention, but of becoming. A brilliantly photographed, yet ultimately hollow monument to its own ambition.

.The storyboard is on paper great and exciting.

The outcome is a big disaster.

Creativity of the director is a focus on flies, belly hole, an amputed leg and a small River.

None of the relationships are put in deep. Focus simply on death, self killing and more.

It was a torture after one hour.

No idea why this movie is hyped.

Some of the actors are great foin their pitiful job. They deserve better.

It stands on place one as the most worst movies of 2025.

I had been genuinely looking forward to this film, as the core concept seemed so promising-and a Palme d'Or from Cannes has never let me down over the decades. Until now. This film, however, is unbearably pretentious and painfully slow, packed with hollow assertions that pile up in what feel like endless repetitions. At first, I switched to double speed, hoping for a shift in tone, rhythm, or substance. The next day, I tried starting over. No luck: not a single compelling human interaction in two and a half hours, just intrusive morbidity in every scene.

Then there are those self-important camera movements, paired with ominous soundscapes or abrupt silences, only to dissolve into aimless editing-cuts that seem to lack any forethought about where they're supposed to lead. It might impress some, but to me, it felt amateurish, and repetition only made it worse.

Otherwise, the film fixates obsessively on the body, suicide, mutilation, rural stupor, brickwork, Trabants, men and pigs-all strung together as if they were somehow equivalent. A dash of Tin Drum navel-gazing erotica and a sprinkle of fin-de-siècle Freudian hysteria-is this supposed to be a "female perspective" on things I'm failing to grasp? I sincerely hope not. Thankfully, there were recent films like Toni Erdmann, The Substance, Anatomy of a Fall, ...

It remains a complete mystery to me why this film is so celebrated and showered with awards-though, on closer inspection, the praise seems to hinge on a single phrase repeated ad nauseam: "the intergenerational perpetuation of trauma." Well, I had to write this review just to process the trauma of watching it. :)

In die Sonne schauen is one of the most powerful German films in years. Mascha Schilinski weaves together four decades of women's lives in a nonlinear, dreamlike mosaic where memories, bodies, and experiences merge into something that transcends generations. With breathtaking visuals and extraordinary performances, the film is dark, poetic, and deeply moving. It lingers long after the credits roll.