---
title: Wings of Desire
type: Movie
date: 2026-07-17
rating: 8
year: 1987
director: Wim Wenders
status: Finished
image: wings-of-desire.jpg
tags:
  - movie
colorSortKey: [0, 117, 6]
---

When I try to describe this film, I keep fleeing from the word *strange* toward *poetic* — because there isn't much strange about it. If you accept its conceit at face value, everything that follows is fairly naturalistic and straightforward, especially given what else I've seen from Wenders. And the conceit is simple enough: angels, in a spiritual but perhaps not biblical sense, are all around us, invisible to everyone except children, tasked with guarding and observing a given patch of the world.

In some ways this is Wenders' too-clumsy attempt at combining the two things he loves — the bizarre, met in an ironical register, and an earnest examination of the kinds of people that not just cinema but humanity tends to gloss over. It's a slower film than the rest of his oeuvre, but not by much; there's more propulsive action here than in, say, Perfect Days. Even so, I think it's at its strongest in its first two-thirds, when it is quiet and observational — when we are mostly left to breathe in the space between these two good-hearted angels and the Berliners they wish to help.

The transition into its final act is perfect, even if the final act itself doesn't quite land for me: the fallen angel talking about symbolism, becoming human, immediately getting bonked on the head, the black-and-white exploding into color.

And then there's Peter Falk. His role is so central, and his performance so arresting, that the movie threatens to become his movie — his odes to humanity mirroring Homer's ode to the epic of peace, his monologues as he sketches extras and tries on hats both fun and beautiful. And the dichotomy he provides by giving identical monologues to each angel — the first successful, the second falling on deaf ears — provides a useful juxtaposition.

Wenders' films are content with textual ambiguity but never with spiritual ambiguity; if I wasn't trained by his other works, I'd argue that Falk can be seen more of a Satanic tempter of angels. We leave the film believing that everyone is in their right place: some angelic, and some never happier to have a head wound.