‘Ghost Song’ Review: Fatih Akin’s Supernatural Romance Flatters but Fails to Find Top Form

German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin’s latest project, the supernatural romance Ghost Song, premiered at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival, continuing a career trajectory that has seen the director explore diverse genres and styles since his mid-2000s peak with Head-On and Edge of Heaven. While Akin has achieved commercial moments with projects like In the Fade and Rhinegold, he has not matched the critical rigor of his earlier work. This newest entry, which follows two 20-year-olds whose courtship transcends death, is earnest yet somewhat clunky, offering a simplistic take on metaphysical questions while remaining accessible and visually striking in glistening monochrome.

The decision to film in black-and-white, utilizing prominent Hamburg landmarks, invites immediate comparisons to Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Like Wenders’ Berlin-set classic, Akin’s Hamburg-based film is an atmospheric romantic fantasy about love across the mortal and ethereal planes. However, the comparison highlights the relative thinness and lack of lyricism in Akin’s more Gen Z-focused homage. Ghost Song carves out its own identity by integrating interpretations of Muslim faith through its young, multicultural cast, a generational targeting further emphasized by an accompanying graphic novel adaptation co-created by Akin and artist Bea Davies.

The narrative centers on Farasha (Mariam Dawoud), a luminous debutante playing a Syrian refugee who has assimilated into Hamburg life after time in Turkey. Despite wearing a headscarf, she lives as a modern, independent woman studying physics in her late father’s footsteps, while hiding a scandalous butterfly tattoo from her mother. At a graduation party in Hamburg’s Telemichel tower, she connects with Faris (Eren M. Guvercin), a German-born Muslim of Turkish descent. After the group decides to move the party elsewhere, their car plunges into the Elbe river, leading to Farasha’s drowning and Faris’s hospitalization.

Farasha awakens in a liminal state where she can walk the earth unseen and unheard, except by her father. He explains that, adhering to certain Muslim mourning traditions, she has 40 days to visit the living in their dreams. Still in denial of her death and infatuated with Faris, she exploits this window for a strange and increasingly perilous courtship.

The film operates on the premise that Farasha and Faris formed such a profound soul connection in a single evening that death cannot sever it. Yet, this romantic notion is undermined by the underdeveloped nature of the characters, despite the charisma of the young actors. Akin’s screenplay leans heavily on sentimental repetition of the couple’s devotion, generating tension around who will sacrifice the most, but offering little spiritual or philosophical depth. More compelling is the depiction of Farasha’s family; a literal out-of-body sequence showing them ritually prepare her corpse for burial stands as the film’s most haunting and layered moment.

When the plot veers toward kitsch, the film retreats to its lush aesthetic. Cinematographer Frank Griebe, working with Akin for the first time, transforms even Hamburg’s less attractive brutalist structures into intimate, chiaroscuro lovers’ playgrounds. The stark monochrome is occasionally punctuated by iridescent title cards and a color shift during the closing credits, reflecting a crucial life-or-death decision.