‘The Message’ Review – To Those Who Seize Life With The Innocence Of Children [Berlinale 2025]

Whenever we hear about a Berlinale winner, curiosity gets the best of us, and we rush to watch it. The Message has received the Silver Bear Jury Prize, and deservingly so. It is a rare film that feels more like a dream than a narrative piece. This feature from Iván Fund is a surrealist drama of magical realism. Defying strict rules to avoid working with animals or children, Fund opts for rebelling and making a child actor his main protagonist, following her around with his camera, enjoying the freedom that she brings to the performance and her relationship with the camera.

According to her mother, Myriam, and her father, Roger, Anika (Anika Bootz) is a gifted child. She can communicate with animals, dead or alive. The film is told through extreme close-ups of the characters’ faces. Fund, along with cinematographer Gustavo Schiaffino, creates a black-and-white tapestry of vignettes on the road, static frames, and extreme shots of hands, hair, lashes, and eyes. It’s the ideal setting for a child growing up on the road but also for adults growing with her as they drag her along their undecided journey from town to city.

At its core, this film is about adults unsure of what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it. Anika knows better than her parents; she has her feet on solid ground, despite being used to evoke fantastical promises that may or may not mean anything in the adult world. The beautiful child actress playing her perfects her many nuances and eccentricities. It’s obvious how Fund extracts that profound performance out of her through careful digging and recognition. 

Fund’s feature excels in showing the world through the eyes of a child who doesn’t have much. In today’s world, it’s both heartbreaking and sweet to watch a child content with little materialistic belongings, but that is Anika, a girl who knows nothing but life on the road with two hipster parents who create a brand out of her, the magical little healer, a persona out of a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel. Fund excels in not making a movie about a child, but a child’s movie, reminiscent of older films made about children roaming the world with reluctant parents who seem like they’re in control, but the opposite is true.

Like Wim Wenders’s Alice in the Cities, Fund never diminishes Anika’s presence in the frame. She is as alive as her journey takes her across the country. The contrast between Anika’s nights in the van and her mornings on the road is striking. Fund perfectly shows that contrast with the doom that the night brings on the little girl, probably the eeriness of her bizarre lifestyle without a grounded existence, then mornings on the road with all the hope they bring to her exhausted heart, as her soul spends time communicating with animals, and her weary body is tired from sleeping on a mattress. 

Sound plays an important part in the film, but external effects are what create the mood. The director pays close attention to the ambiance surrounding the characters, whether the night whispers of the agricultural small towns, the noise of the engine, the cacophony of animal sounds, the shuffling of people putting on clothes, or the tucking of a sheet on a mattress. Sound is another character in a film that relies more on the feel of an event than its actual sequence.

But what message is The Message trying to deliver? There is nothing more appropriate to a poetic film as such than what legendary Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz wrote in his iconic novel, “The Harafish”, One day the door may open to greet those who seize life boldly with the innocence of children and the ambition of angels. 

The Message had its World Premiere in the Competition section of the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival.

Director: Iván Fund

Writer: Iván Fund, Martín Felipe Castagnet

Rated: NR

Runtime: 91m