Godsterminal Remains as Empty as a Reenactment

Godsterminal (Georg Tiller, 2024) is primarily concerned with questions of authorship. Edward “Eddie” Weki, a Sudanese labourer living on Fårö Island, is rapidly losing authorship of his memories to Parkinson’s. For their third collaboration, director Georg Tiller dramatises Wecki’s final days as a pseudo-Bergmanesque elegy replete with references to the gloomy Swede’s corpus.

Weki’s memories cascade in monochrome flashes, puncturing the drab colour of his hospital dwellings. His nurse Alma (Manuela de Gouveia, ostensibly mirroring Bibi Andersson) tries triggering Wecki’s recall of people he can only describe by name. This task is made more urgent by the arrival of Death (Marita Kuunari), who plays Wecki not in a game of Chess but Abanga. The Proustian tactility of objects provides the film its strongest throughline, poignantly emblematising their cultural and personal anchors to the life Wecki must ultimately leave.

Yet Tiller’s penchant for pastiche attenuates the sociological tenderness in the script, co-written by Weki and longtime collaborator Maéva Ranaïnojanoa. Sparks of dry wit from Alma and Death are couched too often in prolonged citations from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) or Hour of the Wolf (1958). The film enumerates other literary sources of inspiration in the closing credits, from Raúl Ruiz to Amos Tutuola, ultimately testifying to Tiller’s intellectual acumen rather than his ability to fuse these citations seamlessly.

What remains most frustrating about Godsterminal is how fleetingly Wecki’s own story is given room to shape the film. Passages with Alma and the daughter (Felicia Godman) about a woman Eddie knew, halt the narrative dead in its tracks, adding scant insight into the intimate aspects of a man rapidly fading from their memory. A rediscovery of an old photograph movingly nods toward a political dimension rooted in the material history of Godsterminal’s protagonist. Yet too often the film, in its own words, remains “empty as a reenactment”.