Wings of Desire
Wings of Desire
Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds -- with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk -- that it might be possible for him to take human form.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 5, 2025
When Angels Long to Bleed
There are films that watch us as we watch them. Wings of Desire is one of them.
Not because it sees us literally, but because it listens—like Damiel does—on the edge of our secret interior lives, hearing the prayers we don’t know how to speak.
Wim Wenders’ Berlin is a city of ghosts, both literal and figurative. The angels hover above divided streets, perched on statues, shadows to our sorrows. They bear witness but never intervene. They cannot. They are cursed with purity. They do not bleed, and therefore they cannot love.
This is a film about the ache to be finite. The ache to fall.
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The Ache for Incarnation
Damiel, the angel who longs to become human, does not fall from grace.
He falls into grace—a grace that smells like sweat, tastes like blood, aches with memory, and dies.
He watches us, century after century, without fatigue. And yet it is the smallest things that undo him:
The weight of a cup of coffee.
The color of a circus performer’s hair.
A man slicing his thumb open on a paper.
A woman brushing a child’s cheek.
The beauty that saves Damiel is not celestial. It is bodily. Broken. Real.
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This Is Not a Fall—It Is a Cruciform Descent
There is a scene late in the film, when Damiel, now flesh, enters a bar soaked in crimson and confusion. He is no longer omniscient. He is no longer untouched.
He bleeds now. He ages now.
He does not know what tomorrow brings.
But his eyes burn with wonder, and his voice, when he speaks, trembles with revelation:
> “Now I know what no angel knows.”
This is not a fall.
This is an incarnation.
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The Cross Beneath the Silence
Wings of Desire is, in its strange way, a cruciform film.
Not because Christ is named.
Not because dogma is preached.
But because it dares to imagine that eternity might envy mortality.
That omnipotence might crave limitation.
That to suffer is not merely to be broken—but to be drawn into the story of a God who did not stay aloft.
It suggests that love is not proven by distance, but by nearness.
That witness is not enough.
Only incarnation saves.
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The Shape of Redemption
The final gift of Wings of Desire is not certainty.
It is presence.
It does not explain suffering. It does not tie up theodicy with a bow.
Instead, it offers this question, trembling with hope:
What if the ache itself is holy?
What if longing—when received rather than resisted—is the evidence that we were made for something more?
Damiel does not find answers. But he finds Marion. And in finding her, he finds time.
Fragile time. Real time. The time of seasons and sickness and circus tents and coffee cups.
He finds the time of love.
And that love requires no omniscience.
It only requires showing up.
This, too, is the cross—not as defeat, but as descent.
Not as a symbol of power, but of nearness.
In Christ, God did not remain above the ache. He stepped into it. And by doing so, He transfigured it.
Wings of Desire does not name this outright. But it gestures toward it—like a finger tracing the shape of a wound.
It reminds us that the divine is not lost in the flesh.
It is found there.
Which means there is hope.
Not the loud kind.
Not the certainty of angels or creeds.
But the quiet hope that maybe—just maybe—we are seen.
That even when we are most fragile, we are not forgotten.
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PostScript: More Reviews for the Soul
If this review moved something in you, you might also be drawn to:
Winter Light — the silence of God, and what it exposes.
Ordet — faith, madness, and resurrection in slow motion.
Through a Glass Darkly — schizophrenia, silence, and the hunger to be loved.
Kapo — God hunts down the lost through barbed wire and ashes.
Mickey 17 — resurrection as labor, and the refusal to treat anyone as expendable.
Each of these is a psalm in disguise.
Each ends, in its own way, at the cross.