Light of My Life, Berlin Film Festival, review: Casey Affleck's new film takes place in a world without women

The film came to Berlin without much fanfare and was programmed in the Panorama section rather than in the main competition

Dir: Casey Affleck; Starring: Casey Affleck, Anna Pniowsky, Tom Bower, Elisabeth Moss, Hrothgar Mathews. Cert TBC; 119 mins

There is a sense that Casey Affleck’s new feature (which had its world premiere at the Berlin Festival this weekend) is being smuggled in through the back door. Affleck is an Oscar winner but his reputation took a severe hit following allegations of sexual harassment against him.

Light of my Life came to Berlin without much fanfare and was programmed in the Panorama section rather than in the main competition. It is a fine film, though, intimate, beautifully crafted and with a slow-burning intensity hat you don’t find in most sci-fi dramas of this nature.

Affleck plays a doting father, first seen from above, telling his child a bedtime story. Only gradually do we realise that they are in a tent deep in the woods, hiding out from the world. A mystery virus dubbed the “female plague” has resulted in the death of most of the women in the world. The child, Rag (Anna Pniowsky), is a precocious 11-year-old girl attempting to pass herself off as a boy. If her true gender is discovered, she is likely to be killed.

The early scenes here are very similar to those in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018). Like Granik, Affleck takes a Thoreau-like pleasure in depicting the beautiful forest wilderness in which the father and daughter are living. It’s the dead of winter. No sunshine intrudes here. The light is always grey. The lugubrious musical soundtrack adds to the sense of foreboding.

Inevitably, when they are spotted in the woods, father and child soon need to go on the run. They find a deserted, dust-covered house. This appears to be the home where the father once lived with his wife (Elizabeth Moss), seen in flashbacks. She died long ago. They stay here for a while and then have to head back out on the road.

At times, Light of My Life plays like a rugged, arthouse version of films like The Kid or Paper Moon in which an adult and a child take on the world together. Their survival skills are very well honed. We are in a dystopian, futuristic world but the film is largely set in the frozen countryside and there are many echoes here of the Depression era, when vagabonds and hobos would criss-cross America trying to stay alive. The pacing is very slow and deliberate, Little colour or humour is included but Affleck does convey the duo’s dependence on one another and the strength of their emotional bonds. “No matter what, I will always be with you,” the father tells the daughter. She is as tough and self-reliant as he is.

Affleck uses natural light wherever possible. He fills the film with lovingly shot imagery of woodlands and snow covered fields. Nature, though, is not benign. The father and daughter come close to freezing to death. They can never tell whether strangers they encounter are friendly or hostile.

There is not much in the way of action here but, late on, Affleck includes a brutal, cleverly shot fight sequence in an attic. This is filmed in such murky light we can’t tell the antagonists apart.

Unpicking the hidden meanings in the film is tough work. Affleck was apparently writing the script at the time he was going through a divorce. His character in the film is full of remorse. “Despite all the science-fiction, this is a story about being a single parent grieving the loss of a nuclear family,” the writer-actor-director has claimed. Light of My Life is dark and, at times, dour. It is also lyrical, subtle and moving in its own austere way.