Till the End of the Night: an unconvincing exercise in neo-noir

• Reviewed at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival

From its title to its torch-song-laden soundtrack, Christoph Hochhäusler’s Till the End of the Night is a neo-noir so seduced by its own antecedents that we could drop the ‘neo’ altogether. This is signalled as early as the film’s first scene, in which a timelapse sequence shows an old apartment being redecorated. Old things get a fresh lick of paint, but essentially remain the same.

The apartment in question is the new home of Robert (Timocin Ziegler) and his girlfriend Leni (Thea Ehre), who had just returned from a stint in prison for a drug-dealing charge. At her homecoming party, Robert is uncomfortable with her friends and something of a boor; even his public displays of affection carry a hint of intimidation. Once the guests leave, the mask drops. He’s an undercover cop, and Leni has been granted a temporary release in order to help the police ensnare an old acquaintance of hers, ex-DJ Victor (Michael Sideris), who now runs a Silk Road-style drug-dealing website from his swanky nightclub. As he attaches an ankle bracelet to her foot, Robert tells Leni she’s not out of prison: “You’re just in a larger prison.”

Characters entrapped by their fates? So far, so noir. The twist is that Leni was once Leonard, and was dealing drugs to afford medical procedures to help her transition. Robert, it turns out, was in a relationship with her, and feels betrayed by her transitioning. His new role as her handler and fake partner gives him plenty of opportunity to exact revenge on her, deadnaming her at every opportunity and indulging in transphobic rants. How exactly Robert’s superiors see him as the right person to run the operation, given his erratic temper and obvious drug habit, is one of the many baffling departures from reality of Florian Plumeyer’s screenplay.

If one were being generous, it could be argued that the film is inventing its own out-of-time universe. One surreal touch sees Leni and Robert trying to fall in with the wealthy drug dealer by attending the same dimly lit dance lessons; at one point, the pair kill time with a quick game of throwing playing cards into a bin. Noir always had a tendency to create its own hermetic worlds, but though it’s easy to believe the impossible, the unlikely is harder to swallow. Most significantly, the relationship between Leni and Robert fails to spark on any credible level. It’s fitting that their most protracted sex scene is an unintentionally funny bit of dogging. Likewise, the relationship between Victor and the couple is unconvincing: far from being a charismatic fun-loving criminal, Victor is a middle-aged grump with a teenage daughter and nary a trace of the pizzazz of his former DJ persona. If he’s meant to be sexually attracted to Leni, it’s not made very clear. Also: why is a man who won fame as a DJ learning to dance now? And what does he see in Robert?

The film is uninterested in answering such questions. Reinhold Vorschneider’s camera maintains its distance for the most part, suggesting the surveillance of the characters – his signature move is a lateral slide away from the action, like a CCTV camera panning to check out the room – but later, during a fight scene, the shot is almost comically opaque to the audience, forcing us to squint into the distance.

It’s difficult to judge the performances, given that the characters are so underwritten and undeveloped that they could be summed up by thumbnail synopses. Ziegler tries his moody best with Robert’s toxic masculinity, while Ehre imbues Leni’s long-suffering victimhood with occasional flashes of resistance. But none of this is much above what you’d expect from daytime television. Her status as a trans woman might have added a new angle to the noirish shifting of identities, but besides some examples of casual transphobia, the film doesn’t appear to be very interested in exploring how trans identity might come into play in a traditional crime-film framework beyond ascribing Leni’s motives to her desire for surgery. Dog Day Afternoon did much the same back in 1975.

Hochhäusler’s fifth feature, Till the End of the Night manages – barely – to tick the boxes of a genre exercise, but it also stands as proof that a slap of new paint isn’t enough to revive an old-fashioned tale.