THE STORY – Sixteen-year-old Ilay aimlessly drifts through the outskirts of Berlin. His mother, Maria, lies on her deathbed, cared for by Ana, a Mexican palliative nurse. Refusing to accept his mother’s impending death, Ilay retreats further into himself, increasingly shutting himself off from reality.
THE CAST – Mohammed Yassin Ben Majdouba, Flor Prieto Catemaxca, Mahira Hakberdieva, Safet Bajraj & Shanthi Philipp
THE TEAM – Saša Vajda (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 87 Minutes
Stillness settles over Berlin’s outer districts like a permanent condition. In “The Lights, They Fall,” that stillness is not simply mood but method, shaping a film that equates quiet with meaning and restraint with insight. Saša Vajda’s debut feature unfolds in a prolonged state of suspension, circling grief without ever allowing it to take shape, as though acknowledging death outright might break the spell it has cast.
Ilay (Mohammed Yassin Ben Majdouba) exists in this suspended space as a figure already beginning to fade. Sixteen years old, he moves through the city as if weightless, detached from consequence and resistant to certainty. His mother, Maria (Mahira Hakberdieva), is dying at home, yet the finality of that truth never quite enters his world. Death remains an abstract concept, something that can be postponed by motion. Hours at a logistics center, compulsory community service, and afternoons by the lake with friends all serve as temporary shelters, activities that fill time without anchoring it.
Night erodes even that fragile sense of structure. Sleep abandons Ilay, and with it any clear distinction between presence and withdrawal. He wanders the city’s periphery in long, unbroken stretches, drifting through streets and housing blocks with a ghostlike inertia. These sequences do not suggest rebellion or searching so much as quiet disappearance, a young man slowly unmooring himself from the life continuing around him. Inside the apartment, time moves differently. Care replaces drift.
Ana (Flor Prieto Catemaxca), a Mexican palliative care nurse, tends to Maria with steady concentration, her days defined by repetition and responsibility. The film observes her work with patience, lingering on gestures that rarely command attention on screen. Bedsheets are adjusted, bodies are supported, breath is monitored. The choice to cast a real-life caregiver lends these moments an undeniable authenticity, grounding the film whenever it threatens to dissolve entirely into abstraction. Yet even here, connection remains elusive. Ana’s own struggles, including her addiction, hover at the edges of the narrative, hinted at but never truly engaged. Rather than forming a parallel exploration of endurance and vulnerability, her interior life becomes another withheld element. What might have complicated the film’s emotional landscape instead reinforces its overall distance.
Silence becomes the film’s dominant language. Dialogue is sparse, often trailing off before thoughts can fully land. Scenes arrive and depart without emphasis, accumulating rather than progressing. The film places unwavering trust in duration, returning again and again to similar rhythms and gestures. Early on, this restraint reads as patience. Over time, it hardens into monotony. Without variation or escalation, repetition loses its expressive power.
A late-emerging idea briefly suggests a shift. Ilay’s belief in the impossibility of death introduces a metaphysical dimension, hinting at a mind struggling to construct logic where none exists. It is a compelling notion, one that could have opened the film inward. Instead, it remains frustratingly underdeveloped, another concept introduced only to be left suspended. The film gestures toward meaning without ever committing to it.
The city itself offers little resistance. Berlin’s outskirts are rendered as neutral zones, stripped of specificity or contrast. Lakes, streets, and interiors exist in a state of visual sameness, mirroring Ilay’s detachment rather than challenging it. The atmosphere is sustained, but it rarely evolves. The environment reflects emotional withdrawal without pushing against it. At every turn, caution prevails. The film avoids confrontation, avoids explanation, and avoids emotional release. This restraint may stem from an ethical desire to treat grief and death with respect, but it ultimately functions as a shield. By refusing intimacy, the film also refuses resonance. Grief is present as a concept, but absent as an experience. Loss is acknowledged, but never allowed to wound.
The seriousness of intent is evident throughout. Anticipatory grief, adolescent dissociation, and the labor of end-of-life care are all worthy subjects, and the film approaches them without exploitation or sentimentality. But seriousness alone cannot sustain a feature-length work. Without emotional access, narrative movement, or a clearer articulation of what is at stake beyond atmosphere, “The Lights, They Fall” remains inert.
What lingers after the final moments is not devastation or quiet revelation, but distance. The film asks its audience to wait, to observe, to sit with uncertainty. Yet it offers little in return beyond its own withholding. In choosing restraint at every opportunity, it ultimately denies itself the intimacy it seems to seek, leaving behind a work defined less by what it reveals than by what it never allows to surface.
