Best Ever
Drama?

The angels wear long coats and stand on buildings, listening. They can’t be seen. They can’t touch anything. They move through Berlin hearing everyone’s thoughts—the old man on the bus remembering the war, the young mother worried about money, the poet typing in his apartment. They listen. They witness. They take notes. That’s all they can do.

Damiel and Cassiel are the two we follow. They’ve been doing this for eternity—watching humans, offering invisible comfort, recording what they see. The film is shot in black and white when we’re with them, seeing through their eyes. Color only appears in the human world they can’t touch. Wenders makes the metaphysical literal. Angels see the world drained of warmth because they can’t participate in it.

The film moves slowly. Long takes, minimal dialogue, scenes that breathe instead of rush. This isn’t a plot-driven narrative. It’s a meditation. The angels drift through the city—the library, the circus, the Wall (this is 1987, before it fell). They observe. A child draws. A man contemplates suicide (Cassiel sits with him, unseen, until the moment passes). An old man named Homer wanders the ruins, remembering what used to be there. The angels collect all of this. They witness everything and participate in nothing.

Then Damiel sees Marion. She’s a trapeze artist with a traveling circus. He watches her perform, watches her sit alone in her trailer, watches her worry about the future. He falls in love. Not with who she is—he barely knows her. With the fact that she is. She’s human. She can feel cold. She can taste coffee. She can be lonely in a way that means something because she exists in time, in a body, in the world. That’s when he decides to fall.

The film shows this as transformation. Damiel wakes up in color. He’s bleeding (his first physical sensation). He touches a wall. The texture is real. He tastes his blood. He finds coffee and burns his tongue, then winces at the bitterness, then slowly learns to like it. Every sensation is new and overwhelming. He’s traded eternity for this—cold air, rough concrete, bitter coffee. He’s ecstatic.

Peter Falk appears as himself, an actor filming a movie in Berlin. He’s an ex-angel who fell decades ago. He can sense Damiel even though Damiel’s invisible. He talks to him without seeing him, tells him about the pleasures of the physical world—smoking, drinking coffee, drawing with charcoal and getting it on your hands. He’s not trying to convince Damiel to fall. Damiel’s already falling. Falk is just reporting from the other side: it’s worth it.

Then Damiel goes to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

This is the scene where everything the film has been building crashes into focus. Damiel, now fully human, moves into the crowd at a Berlin rock club. Cave is on stage singing “The Carny” and “From Her to Eternity”—songs about desire, death, longing, loss. All the things angels observe but can’t feel. The crowd is packed tight. Bodies pressing against Damiel. Heat. Sweat. The smell of cigarettes and beer. The bass rattling his chest. People shouting, singing along, lost in the music.

Damiel stands there taking it in. This is what he chose. Not love, not romance, not Marion specifically—this. The crush of human beings sharing something together. The transcendence of live music when you’re inside it, not watching from above. Cave’s voice is raw and desperate, the band is loud and urgent, and Damiel is feeling all of it for the first time—the sound vibrating through his body, the proximity of strangers, the collective surrender to the moment.

The camera holds on his face. He’s not smiling exactly. He’s overwhelmed. This is what it means to be alive: standing in a crowd listening to Nick Cave sing about mortality while your heart pounds and someone’s elbow digs into your ribs and you don’t want to be anywhere else. The angels hear everything but they can’t feel the bass in their chest. They see everything but they can’t lose themselves in a song. Damiel just learned the difference.

That’s the film’s revelation. Not that being human is better than being an angel. That being human means participation. You don’t just observe beauty—you stand in a sweaty club and let it wreck you. You don’t just witness connection—you get jostled by strangers and feel their heat and know you’re part of something together, even if it only lasts for the length of a song.

When Damiel finally meets Marion after the concert, she recognizes him. Not as the angel who watched her, but as someone who belongs in her life. They don’t have a meet-cute. They have a conversation about loneliness and solitude and the difference between them. About wanting someone to confirm that you exist. Marion talks about needing another person not to complete her but to share the weight of being alive. Wenders isn’t embarrassed by big emotions. He puts them in his actors’ mouths and trusts you to sit with them.

The film is in conversation with Rilke’s Duino Elegies—the idea that angels might envy us, not because we’re better, but because we get to participate. We get to taste the coffee, feel the cold, stand in a crowd at a Nick Cave show and feel the music in our bones. We’re mortal. That’s the gift. The angels are eternal, which sounds like paradise until you realize eternity without sensation is just watching other people live.

Wings of Desire is slow, poetic, unabashedly romantic in the way European art films used to be before irony became mandatory. Henri Alekan’s cinematography makes 1980s Berlin look timeless—the black-and-white sections feel like they’re from the ’40s, the color sections like they’re from the future. The Wall divides the city, but the angels cross it freely. Borders don’t mean anything to beings without bodies.

The film ends with Marion and Damiel together, human, vulnerable, alive. The film doesn’t promise they’ll be happy. It promises they’ll feel it—whatever comes. The joy, the fear, the music, the cold, the taste of coffee, the press of bodies in a crowd. All of it. That’s enough. That’s everything.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Wings of Desire Criterion Blu-ray includes Wenders’s commentary and a documentary on the film’s production in divided Berlin, plus an essay on Rilke’s influence and a breakdown of how they shot the Nick Cave concert sequence.
• For the music that makes the film’s climax transcend, grab Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Tender Prey—the album that includes both songs Damiel hears at that Berlin club.
• If the Rilke connection intrigues you, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus Vintage edition is the Stephen Mitchell translation Wenders drew from.