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Critics Consensus: Tense, complex, and drenched in atmosphere, Phoenix is a well-acted, smartly crafted war drama that finds writer-director Christian Petzold working at peak power.
Critic Consensus: Tense, complex, and drenched in atmosphere, Phoenix is a well-acted, smartly crafted war drama that finds writer-director Christian Petzold working at peak power.
All Critics (122) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (120) | Rotten (2)
Both a powerful allegory for post-war regeneration and a rich Hitchcockian tale of mistaken identity.
Life is a bombed-out, soulless cabaret in Christian Petzold's Phoenix, a haunting portrait of identity, loss and the search for answers in post-WWII Berlin.
Sometimes implausible and always engrossing, "Phoenix" takes us to postwar Berlin, a shell of a city where concentration camp survivor Nelly is a shell of herself.
You may not buy all the story twists, but perhaps the script is not meant to be taken literally.
There is intrigue. There is suspense. Guilt -- a man's guilt, a nation's -- hangs heavy in the air.
Provocative, profoundly moving and the acting is virtuosic.
While Phoenix's Vertigo-meets the-Holocaust plot line leads to a final scene that will be on many critics' year-end highlights reel, that scene features one good dramatic revelation in a film that doesn't quite sustain its drama.
Petzold establishes a strong sense of time and place, from the seedy, dimly lit confines of the Phoenix cabaret to the ticking of the clock in Lene's bedroom. He brings postwar Berlin to vivid life without calling attention to period trappings.
Truly elevating the pulpy source material, Petzold swirls the pot of suspense, revenge and guilt with not only a Hitchcockian but also a Fassbinderian touch. Films don't get more psychologically complex than this.
"Phoenix," Christian Petzold's allegorical story set in post-war Germany, is almost indescribably deep, layered and complex.
Filled with inky blues and blacks, the look of [Phoenix] recalls Jean-Pierre Melville's masterful Army of Shadows, except this is a more intimate effort about two war-traumatized individuals.
[Nina] Hoss's step-by-step transformation from trembling and small to straight-backed and ready to perform is a marvel, a fascinating performance to behold.
The plot is so nuanced, the characters so keenly observed and realized that it's shocking that the movie is also so economical . . . No moment is wasted as the film builds to what I can only describe as a perfect ending.
Super Reviewer
A very moving story of a woman who has been betrayed to the Nazis and returns to her home town to reconcile with her husband despite having a new face. The final scene remains long after the film has ended.
There's a lot of ambiguity here. Pale and thin, she has returned like a ghost in search of her past. She visits the bombed out rubble of her bygone home like a specter floating over the ruins. Nina was a singer before the war. Her husband, a pianist. As a Holocaust survivor, Nelly has risen from the ashes of the past. Phoenix symbolically describes her progress, but it's also the name of the club at which she finds her husband working. Kurt Weill's melody, "Speak Low" is a recurring score that pops up here and there. The tone of the drama is pensive and atmospherically haunting, but it's very vague. The way these two souls interact is a long drawn out game of deception and remembrance. You'll have lots of questions as the narrative unfolds. What exactly are these people thinking? Their tentative relationship is based on cryptic intentions. Director Christian Petzold keeps all of these questions unanswered on purpose as Nina goes in search of her former self and for truth. Just simmer for awhile in the pensive mood. The mystery ultimately builds to a perfectly constructed moment of clarity. fastfilmreviews.com
Nina Hoss delivers perhaps the very best and most challenging performance of her career in this gripping film about what it is like to become a stranger to the person you love (and vice versa) - even though the suicide of a certain character comes up as quite unnecessary.
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