In die Sonne schauen

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.

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.

Bertold Brecht said: a picture of the Krupp steel plant says nothing about the Krupp steel plant.

This pretentious piece of vanity is an overload of pictures and sounds, but it's hollow inside. It transports nothing than its own nothingness camouflaged as importance - with an exclamation mark. I am important! I am art !

But it isn't. Art isn't about barfing out all that comes to your mind. Or filming all that happens. It's about choosing, about selecting, about extracting. Extracting truth. About experiencing something, and then expressing it in the form of art you chose. I don't have the feeling that in this movie anything was felt and expressed by the authors and makers. They more like scientists, inspect, watch and depict animals in a laboratory. Staying neutral and detached.

There is no truth in this, as noise has no truth. You can't even make up your own truth, as your head is full of noise, no space or time for fantasising something up.

You leave the cinema with a headache and a desire to barf it all out again.

Three months later, I can remember maybe one or two scenes of the movie, and not a single emotion. The rest has anhiliated itself.

I saw the movie in Cannes. Very unusual and interesting images. Meditative. I fell asleep twice. So it's really good for relaxing.

I missed the last hour though. I left. It was juat. So endlessly repetitive.

I didn't understand what it was all about. But maybe it's more of a movie for women. By women for women. The men are crippled or dead or sex monsters or lying there sick. Pigs grunt. The men grunt like pigs. Most have mustaches.

The women are all suffering somehow but you don't really understand why. Nobody laughs except the kids. A colorless world. Very enigmatic. Like a modern painting but unfortunately without impact.

There is hardly any conflict either. To say something, to have a point of view: how old-fashioned. Nothing more than a few catalog slogans.

It was edited very cryptically, so that it passes for art. I had no idea which era was being shown and who was who and from whom. Really, I had no clue. I think it would be great for a 30-minute video installation.

But as a 2.5 hour movie? Hard to bear.

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.