This is one of the best movies on Nazism ever made and incredibly innovative in how it shows the horror of the Holocaust, in the very place of "Final Solution" main extermination camp, one of the most represented historical events in cinema. While it obviously deserved the Academy Awards of best sound and best foreign language film, I consider it also was the best among the nominees for best picture (and the winner was the worst! What a shame!).
A review is certainly not enough for explaining a so deep, complex movie, so attentive to details, so strong without using easy emotional formulae. Dialogues and cinematography are awesome, music score and the sounds in background (sometimes constrasting with the calm beauty of flowers or any other comfort in the opposite side of the wall) are disturbing. Director Jonathan Glazer accomplishes a great work, very clever in showing visually only the tormentors. Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel have great performances as horrible Auschwitz couple as Hedwig and commandant Rudolf Höß. The script brilliantly explores the banality of evil, the selective love and care, the dehumanization, hatred and revenge combined with opportunism and upward mobility, the marriage without love and full of interest, the military ethos, the usage of part of the prisioners for forced labor and the extermination of the others, the fact that good people may be found everywhere, and the children living in comfort but either silently disturbed by those sounds of suffering and violence or mocking on mass murder in gas chamber (the latter being Klaus, the xenophobic eldest son, I suppose). Distracted spectators may lose important elements which appear, sometimes in background or in discrete details, such as the robbery of properties of killed jews, the Holocaust trains, the smoke caused by the burning of bodies, the Zyklon B, possibly Austrian communist political prisoner Eleonore Hodys, the crematoria technology develipped for mass incineration. It is a mature film with very sophisticated aesthetic and narrative elements which will have a place in the history of the cinema as one of the best movies representing that paramount stain in human civilization.
A review is certainly not enough for explaining a so deep, complex movie, so attentive to details, so strong without using easy emotional formulae. Dialogues and cinematography are awesome, music score and the sounds in background (sometimes constrasting with the calm beauty of flowers or any other comfort in the opposite side of the wall) are disturbing. Director Jonathan Glazer accomplishes a great work, very clever in showing visually only the tormentors. Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel have great performances as horrible Auschwitz couple as Hedwig and commandant Rudolf Höß. The script brilliantly explores the banality of evil, the selective love and care, the dehumanization, hatred and revenge combined with opportunism and upward mobility, the marriage without love and full of interest, the military ethos, the usage of part of the prisioners for forced labor and the extermination of the others, the fact that good people may be found everywhere, and the children living in comfort but either silently disturbed by those sounds of suffering and violence or mocking on mass murder in gas chamber (the latter being Klaus, the xenophobic eldest son, I suppose). Distracted spectators may lose important elements which appear, sometimes in background or in discrete details, such as the robbery of properties of killed jews, the Holocaust trains, the smoke caused by the burning of bodies, the Zyklon B, possibly Austrian communist political prisoner Eleonore Hodys, the crematoria technology develipped for mass incineration. It is a mature film with very sophisticated aesthetic and narrative elements which will have a place in the history of the cinema as one of the best movies representing that paramount stain in human civilization.