![]() Other deserters think it expedient to join the irregular “mission” under his protective command, an innkeeper needs an authority figure to execute the looter who has been stealing from him, and finally senior military figures decide they need someone to license the massacre or “simplified court martial” of prisoners who have become expensive to feed. Schwentke’s movie shows how almost everyone more or less suspects the truth about the phoney “captain”, but goes along with the deception. The captain’s uniform, like the emperor’s new clothes, is an imposture that speaks to the dishonesty and cynicism and moral bankruptcy in everyone’s heart. But it isn’t that he has fooled anyone exactly. Max Hubacher is disturbingly convincing as thi sinister sociopath, instinctively knowing how to lose his temper at the slightest sign of suspicion, doubling down on his claim and brazening it out. ![]() The drama is based on the bizarre true story of Willi Herold, a German deserter who while on the run chanced upon a Luftwaffe captain’s uniform, dressed up in it and with extraordinary effrontery and cunning played on Germany’s cringing fear of authority by passing himself off as an officer of that rank, claiming to be on a special mission from the Führer to root out deserters and, incredibly, actually presided over a mass slaughter of prisoners at a labour camp – like someone who senses the best way to avoid a witch hunt is to set yourself up as the fiercest witchfinder of all. It’s a movie with echoes of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum or Ralf Rothmann’s To Die in Spring – written and directed by Robert Schwentke, a veteran of commercial Hollywood fare who has gone back to basics with this brutally stark picture, shot by Florian Ballhaus in a crystalline black-and-white: a look inspired, perhaps, by Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. H ere is a nightmare from the German home front in April 1945, collapsing into horror and chaos with the looming reality of imminent defeat. ![]()
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