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The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day Conveys More Than Mere Truism

The new German film The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day—premiering at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdamconveys a good deal more than the simple, direct truism of its title suggests. Practically defying description, it transcends simple genre boundaries and establishes a unique and evocative collaboration between a group of children and its director. Part Lynchian fiction, part experimental documentary in the tradition of a Herz Frank, Krzysztof Kieślowski, or William Greaves, The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day boldly lets its young cast take the reins and in doing so, weaves an odd, dark tale of an adolescent generation’s hopes and dreams—and nightmares.

The film begins in a gymnasium with the group of German schoolchildren, all of them exceedingly well-mannered, dressed, and coiffed, speaking thoughtfully in turns about their fears. One worries about losing those she loves. Another about animals in the nighttime. Another, being bullied. Exceedingly patient, the camera focuses unerringly on each as they speak. At this point, the film resembles nothing so much as Kieślowski’s famous documentary short Gadajace Glowy (aka Talking Heads, 1980): a series of talking heads, so to speak, addressing the questions posed them with an admirable frankness and directness.

Yet for director Christina Friedrich—and her large cast/crew of adolescent collaborators—there is more in store, beginning with an unseen authority/interviewer concluding the session with a telling of a Grimm Brothers tale: “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.” (In it, a child too simple to know fear ventures from home to bear witness to a series of exceedingly unsettling events.) Some of the children fall asleep, and in the next sequence, the group travels through a forest path to a castle of sorts, where one expertly shuffles a deck of cards and the others mimic him, speak even more directly about their nightmares, and, again, begin to fall asleep, the boundaries between day and night, wakefulness and dreaming beginning to collapse.

boy sleeps at a table.
A child falls asleep in The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day. Contributed photo.

To this point, the film has felt like an experimental, verité-style documentary—a modernized Gadajace Glowy, perhaps, focusing on youth, or something like Frank’s Ten Minutes Older, a film that with its intense close-ups charted the panoply of human emotion; from here, it takes on the approach of something more like Greaves’ brilliant Symbiopsychotaxiplasm as the children’s stated nightmares are rendered, in turn, with the children enacting them in various landscapes, often with elaborate, evocative, handmade costumes depicting the animals and demons they admire and fear. At first the film’s subjects, the children, appear now to be in a way, its directors, taking the reins to determine and depict what the story will be.

If all of that sounds like nothing else you’ve seen, that is at least in part the point of The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day: to disrupt expectation and convention and to tell a story in complete collaboration with the young schoolchildren at its center. It’s a poetic and ambitious approach and at its best conveys an authentic and sincere reenactment of what those children say they fear most; it’s also, at its conclusion, emphatically joyous in sending the message that those fears and anxieties can be confronted. In that sense, Friedrich’s film is intentionally cathartic.

A clpse-up image of a girl falling asleep from The Night Is Dark and Colder than the Day.
A child falls asleep in The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day. Contributed photo.

To take such an approach is not without risk. I’m sure that securing permissions from a group of twenty-odd adolescents, their parents and guardians, and the various institutions that regulate their education and wellness must have been daunting. And in seeking out an authentic reciprocity between filmmaker and subject to the extent where the latter—the group of youths—essentially become the directors of the tale—any kind of narrative urgency is lost. The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day is a film to experience and admire more so than it is to learn “what happens,” and its loose structure and collaborative approach invite a slightly shambolic structure that threatens at times to sap its energy.

The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day’s credits name ten individuals in its cast, but there are in sum more than 30 youths depicted in the film. Many make an impression as individuals, but the project is more aimed at charting and honoring the psyches of the collective more so than that of any single protagonist. Shot with an often surrealist, at times even Lynchian approach to its design, accompanied by a haunting, spectral soundtrack from composer Jacob Suske, and practically indescribable in its nature, The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day is a film that takes its charge—its charges, plural and collective—with utmost sincerity.

Written by J Paul Johnson

J Paul Johnson is Professor Emeritus of English and Film Studies at Winona (MN) State University. Since retiring in 2021 he publishes Film Obsessive, where he reviews new releases, writes retrospectives, interviews up-and-coming filmmakers, and oversees the site's staff of 25 writers and editors. His film scholarship appears in Women in the Western, Return of the Western (both Edinburgh UP), and Literature/Film Quarterly. An avid cinephile, collector, and curator, his interests range from classical Hollywood melodrama and genre films to world and independent cinemas and documentary.

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