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Germany, France, Poland · 2017
Rated R · 1h 58m
Director Robert Schwentke
Starring Max Hubacher, Milan Peschel, Frederick Lau, Marko Dyrlich
Genre Drama, History, War
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Germany, 1945. Willi Herold, a deserter of the German army, stumbles into a Nazi captain's uniform abandoned during the last desperate weeks of the Third Reich. Newly emboldened by the allure of a suit that he has stolen only to stay warm, Willi discovers that many Germans will follow the leader, whoever he is.
The film-craft is high quality, with the passion and care taken evident. Schwentke brings the brutal winter during wartime to realistic life. If you have historical interest in deep details of the war, or are fascinated by psychopathic war criminals, this might be a film for you.
Filmed in black and white in the wintry countryside of Görlitz, Germany, Schwentke’s vision of a man who would be posthumously named the Executioner of Emsland is chilling and yet, at times, almost farcical.
In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
It’s too bleak to laugh at and too absurd to cry over. That it’s true adds another insanity-inducing element.
Outlandish as its action often is, The Captain is based on a true story. Schwentke’s film, though, has an allegorical/satirical axe to grind, and it more often than not frames the narrative in dark archetypal terms.
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
The Captain, Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.
The film is consistently beautiful to look at in an “industrial metal album cover” kind of way, pairing dimly lit, black-and-white cinematography and artfully composed mise-en-scéne.
Few and far between are the movies...that actually implicate modern viewers in the evil, which is precisely what makes The Captain such a remarkable film. Not a great one, mind you — the movie starts out with a bang but swiftly falls into a kind of prolonged and distressingly outlandish tedium, and lodges there for the better part of its rather taxing running time — but a brave and uncompromising indictment of human nature, Teutonic or otherwise.
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
The central premise is arresting, as is the style, but there's a lot more that could have been done with it than just show how one ill-defined individual instantly opts to join his country's lowest form of life.
Screen International by Wendy Ide
It’s a powerful, profoundly uncomfortable watch.
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