In the German film Phoenix, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust (Nina Hoss) attempts to reconnect to her past, which she cannot leave behind.  Her efforts are complicated by a couple of factors; she has undergone cosmetic surgery (because of a gunshot injury to her face) and no longer looks quite the same, and her absent husband (Ronald Zehrfeld, who reminds me of Russell Crowe) may have been the one to betray her to the Nazis.  Oh, and he does not recognize her, but is sufficiently impressed by the resemblance to try to recruit her to obtain his supposedly dead wife’s inheritance.

Sounds like a European Hitchcock film, and it plays that way, but in a minor, lower key.  Christian Petzold’s thriller is not conventionally thrilling because it eschews action and suspense in favor of character drama and an examination of the moral parameters of the situation. Yet even in a lower, minor key the film conveys hurt, grief, wonder, potential, vengeance and stunned realization in compelling fashion.  The film also ends at a point where few American filmmakers or studios would dare to stop.  Only John Sayles’ Limbo (1999) comes to mind right now as a parallel, and that is a wildly different film.

Hoss and Zehrfeld are very good, especially as the story climaxes, yet my favorite performer is Nina Kunzendorf (who reminds me of Lisa Edelstein) in a key role as the survivor’s friend, who takes care of her, but also takes her time filling in missing pieces of the past.  The slow pace and enigmatic characterizations may not work for some viewers but Petzold’s film gets better as it goes along, and if one stays with it, the ending is pure dynamite.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  26 August 2015.