it as much as all the critics loved it. Considering what it was about, it was a very quiet movie. In a nutshell, it’s about a commandant at Auschwitz and his family trying to create an idyllic home right on the other side of the wall. That visual is absolutely chilling. We never see what is going on inside the wall. We just hear sounds and see the smoke and flashing light while watching this Nazi family live their best lives in their lush gardens.
I think it was a very good film but there were some filmmaking choices that I wasn’t crazy about. There were several times when the screen was intentionally blank for what felt like a long time, including the opening of the movie. That felt kind of pretentious to me. And I wasn’t crazy about the abrupt end shot of maintenance workers cleaning a hall of the Auschwitz museum.
There was one sequence that happened a couple of times that was very stunning visually — but I didn’t understand it until I read about it. The father was reading Hansel & Gretal as a bedtime story to his young daughter while, simultaneously, we see a young girl hiding fruit in bushes at night via night vision photography. While watching I wasn’t sure what that was. An imagination? A dream? A metaphor? But it was supposed to be a real little girl who lived nearby who was hiding that food for the starving Auschwitz prisoner workers to find. At first I was like “but how is she getting inside?” But she was outside on the road leading up to the gate. So I guess she was hiding food for prisoners who were being forced to build other manufacturing buildings right outside of the wall. The juxtaposition of Hansel & Gretal and the night shots of that little girl were stunning once I understood what I had been watching.
Overall, it was a film well worth watching and I’m glad I did.
