Tomte singer Thees Uhlmann has written a novel – and “Mittagsstunden” star Charly Hübner has filmed it: It’s hard to imagine more concentrated competence for dry, melancholic humor than in “Sophia, der Tod und ich”!
Suddenly Death (Marc Hosemann) rings at the door – and does his job so badly that the geriatric nurse Reiner (Dimitrij Schaad) has still not blessed the time even after the prescribed maximum death time of three minutes.
Stupid – and so Death, who is called Morten by the way and has many other Deaths as colleagues, is following his client who is still very alert and who has to go anyway to go to the going to northern Germany for his mother’s birthday…
“Sophia, Death and I” is a fantasy road movie – full of a very fine, unmistakably North German humor and a stubborn melancholy that is most reminiscent of the films of cult master director Aki Kaurismäki (“Falling Leaves”).
Anyone who enjoyed watching Charly Hübner ponder Plattland in last year’s cinema success “Mittagsstunden” (with 350,000 viewers* the most successful German arthouse hit of the year) should therefore not miss his debut as a feature film director (especially since he a smaller role as a stubborn hotel manager himself).
» The detailed film review of “Sophia, Death and I”
The conclusion of our 4-star review is then: “Charly Hübner sets an exclamation mark with his feature film directorial debut! The ‘Mittagsstunden’ star spices up Thees Uhlmann’s novel, which is already clever and comical, with a great deal of dry North German humour, a macabre melancholy and directorial ambitions that one is otherwise not necessarily used to from German comedy cinema.”
Speaking of directorial ambitions: We also have Charly Hübner as a guest in the current episode of our podcast – and there we talk above all about the very special look of the film, which doesn’t look like a typical high-gloss comedy at all:
PS: In order to counteract the “prejudice about lame German films” that is repeatedly brought up, the FILMSTARTS editorial team decided to start the initiative “German cinema is (yet) awesome!”: Every month we select a German film , which we particularly liked, inspired or fascinated in order to accompany the theatrical release – regardless of its size – editorially like a blockbuster (i.e. with a large number of articles, a separate podcast episode and so on). “Sophia, Death and I” is the first film to which we give this seal.
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2023-08-31 19:28:41
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