Over three hours and five different chapters, Matthias Glasner’s “Dying” chronicles the travails of an estranged family of four: an elderly couple on the brink of death, their successful composer son and their alcoholic, ne’er-do-well daughter. The film casts a wide net over their experiences, and every leading performance is as impeccable as the last. However, Glasner’s formal rigidity prevents their stories from feeling intrinsically bound, leaving each of them with little to say.

The film opens in the German countryside with elderly couple Lissy (Corinna Harfouch) and Gerd Lunies (Hans-Uwe Bauer) being found helpless by a neighbor. Lissy’s litany of ailments render her only semi-mobile, and she often ends the day by soiling herself, while Gerd’s dementia leads him to wander naked into people’s homes. They can’t help each other, and their adult children are too preoccupied with their own metropolitan lives to get involved.

While the premise verges on misery “misery porn” (other works about helpless older couples like Michael Haneke’s “Amour” and Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex” come to mind), Glasner takes a wry and frank approach to these indignities. He frames them not only as inevitable, but familiar — for instance, Lissy’s intense embarrassment and her rankled responses to well-meaning helping hands.

As Lissy wrestles with placing Gerd in an assisted living facility, “Dying” comes achingly close to probing the fears of death (and of dying alone) that keep hovering in its margins. However, once it switches focus to their middle-aged son Tom (Lars Eidinger), the movie’s foundation begins to rattle. Tom, the pseudo-stepfather to his ex’s baby with another man, is deep in the process of perfecting an orchestral piece called “Sterben” (“Dying”) written by his old friend and uneasy collaborator Bernard (Robert Gwisdek), though his young musicians don’t seem to grasp its nuances.

The musicians’ conversations and debates on death lead to new ways of expressing and performing, but in these moments, the film’s self-reflexivity begins to stagnate, as Glasner and cinematographer Jakub Bejnarowicz seldom match this sense of artistic transformation with visual evolution of their own. To quote a critic of Tom’s orchestral conducting in the film, “The whole thing is a huge banality.” This particular criticism appears late in the film as a bit of tongue-in-cheek lamp shading, as though the movie were protecting itself, but this instinct towards self-preservation is part of its problem. “Dying” is often too safe and too hermetically sealed to make a real emotional impact, despite the caliber of performances at play.

As Gerd, Bauer shuffles confusedly between hallways and embodies a tragically lonely physicality, one which seems to be reaching out for recognition or understanding. Just as tragic as his loss of understanding is the way his eyes briefly light up when Tom makes a fleeting visit, affording Eidinger the chance to embody a burdened stillness, as though he were at a loss for answers. His dynamic with Harfouch is just as alluring, not only as a brilliant stroke of casting (Tom and Lissy look like mirror images of one another), but as a doorway to some hilariously bizarre discomforts, as the looming specter of mortality gives way to frankness and admissions of regret.

However, Glasner’s stilted visual approach unfortunately goes hand-in-hand with stilted writing. The dialogue is often snappy (Harfouch in particular delivers it with a sharp tongue), but the moments where “Dying” is able to convey a sense of lived history between the characters are few and far between. In the process, spoken words become the movie’s crutch, especially when the fourth key family member is introduced: Tom’s sister Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), an amateur singer and wayward dental assistant having an affair with her employer, Sebastian (Ronald Zehrfeld).

On its face, the booze-soaked romance between the two is perhaps the closest the movie comes to feeling emotionally vibrant or aesthetically affecting — the camera matches the actors’ mood, their movement and their energy — but the lack of meaningful connection between Ellen and her family is something the movie isn’t able to fully convey or deftly dramatize. Stangenberg is immensely committed, as a young woman lost down a hole of her addiction and isolation, but she belongs to a different movie entirely, with its own distinct rhythms. Rather than matching the pitch of the other chapters, the film’s Ellen segments are little more than an appendix.

These disparate chapters are lightly connected by feelings of isolation and fears of never finding closure or reconciliation. However, to imbue the story as a whole with these feelings — absent any sort of challenge, subversion or rumination — leaves it vulnerable to the very criticisms of banality that seem to be on Glasner’s mind and on the tip of the movie’s tongue. If there’s any reflection or revelation to be found, it’s that the connective tissue between various threads involves phone calls that read differently once the film revisits them from another character’s point of view. But beyond this minor trick of perspective, there’s little that’s truly cinematic about “Dying,” a film of remarkable performance and subject matter, laid low by unremarkable filmmaking.