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United Kingdom · 2021
1h 34m
Director Luke Holland
Starring
Genre Documentary
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A striking, powerful, and supremely urgent film about the last living generation of everyday Germans to participate in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. The film focuses on not the soldiers, but the citizens who were eyewitnesses and sometimes active participants in the horrors of World War Two and the concentration camps.
Slant Magazine by Chris Barsanti
Luke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil.
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
There are no heroes in Final Account, no one to empathize with. What makes it uniquely worth watching is its cast of octogenarians and nonagenarians who were eyewitnesses and in some cases active participants in the horrors of the concentration camps.
Screen Daily by Fionnuala Halligan
Final Account is shocking footage which hasn’t quite made the leap into being a forensic film.
Clocking in at a swift 90 minutes, Final Account is like a teenager-friendly approach to “Shoah,” designed as an introduction to issues of responsibility, guilt and the banality of man’s inhumanity to man.
Austin Chronicle by Matthew Monagle
Final Account is about today as much as yesterday, and that makes it perhaps the most urgent World War II documentary of them all.
Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan
Final Account aims to provide insight into the psychological mechanism that would allow otherwise good people to stand idly by (or actively participate in) the perpetration of mass murder. As such, it’s only partly effective, and frustrating.
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
In the end, the power of Final Account resides in the way it shows how human nature reacts to lies, propaganda and state-sanctioned atrocity. Some people, looking for an excuse to do evil, will jump right in. A very tiny faction will risk all to fight against them.
Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper
What makes Final Account so intriguing and, yes, so infuriating, is seeing and hearing from so many Germans who are near the end of their days and have somehow managed to make excuses, to rationalize, to distance themselves from the hell that was their homeland in the 1930s and 1940s.
If Final Account has a shortcoming, it’s that few moments stick out as most chilling of all.
Explicitly, his film shows how a hundred shades of grey combine to make a darkness. Implicitly, it warns that it could well happen again.
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