Director: Matthias Glasner
A German family drama that follows three grown siblings and their estranged mother as illness and mortality pull them back into each other's lives.
What is Dying about?
Lissy Lunies has spent years apart from her children, each of whom carries a private wound. Her son Tom works as a conductor, pouring himself into rehearsals for a difficult new choral piece while quietly unraveling at home. Her daughter Ellen struggles with addiction and a relationship that keeps sliding toward collapse. When Lissy's health fails and her husband's condition worsens in parallel, the family is forced into the same rooms, the same hospital corridors, the same unfinished conversations they spent decades avoiding. Rather than building to a single crisis, the film moves through separate chapters, each centered on one family member, so that the audience assembles the fuller picture only gradually, the way relatives themselves often piece together how far apart they had actually drifted.
Cast & crew
Lars Eidinger plays Tom with a controlled intensity that suits a character who expresses everything through music and almost nothing through speech, while Corinna Harfouch gives Lissy a brittleness that never tips into simple sentimentality. Lilith Stangenberg's Ellen supplies the film's rawest scenes, and Robert Gwisdek and Ronald Zehrfeld round out a cast that treats every side character as someone with a full life happening off-screen.
Context & significance
Directed and written by Matthias Glasner, the film runs a substantial 183 minutes, using that length to give each family member's storyline room to breathe rather than compressing everything into a single arc. It premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, where its unhurried structure and ensemble performances drew attention, and it has since been recognized among the more ambitious German dramas of its year for the way it treats grief as something lived through in installments rather than resolved in one scene.
Where & how to watch
Dying is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, presented with a Farsi-language interface and Persian subtitles alongside a Persian dub track, so viewers can choose the format that suits them. No separate purchase or download is required to start streaming once signed in.