From his compassionate perspective, death is seen as a release rather than a tragedy. For these characters, dying is the easy part, it’s living that’s hard.

Matthias Glasner’s Dying might sound like an ordeal, but this rich, novelistic and mordantly funny Berlin film festival prize winner wears its themes and running time lightly.

Conversely, this is not a desolate gaze into the abyss — it’s stuff-of-life family drama brilliantly acted and elegantly executed, with the density and episodic structure of a very compelling mini-series.

Both death and life hang over everything in Dying, but perhaps most strikingly, it’s the pervading loneliness that mists every character’s lives that is most haunting.