This is a legitimately interesting angle to look at the Holocaust through, and I genuinely appreciate what it's going for, it has an incredibly frank visual attitude, every frame containing interesting bits of visual storytelling...it just fails to deliver much of a broader story with its incredible eye for visual and audible storytelling. The banality of evil is the only theme that comes across, over, and over, and over, and over again, which works extremely well for the first two thirds of the movie, but then I just became numb to it. Maybe the fact that I became numb to it is the point? Maybe the atrocity fading into the background for me, and its potent chilling factor wearing off is supposed to tell me something about myself? But that kind audience chastisement only works if the movie gave me a story in the foreground that actually succeeded in distracting me from the evil in the background, which it didn't, and I think had the movie actually given me a comparatively banal story to focus on, something in the vein of a good, simple, Yasujiro Ozu movie but set outside a concentration camp, would have been a fascinating means to really explore the banality of evil. But the movie is content in not delivering much of a conflict, and simply showing us characters distracting themselves from the screams of Jews going into the furnaces for just over 90 minutes, and not much more.
I won't fault its visual storytelling and sound design though. Both are just as good as they've been hyped up to be. I just wish they were done in service of a movie that had more to say.
I won't fault its visual storytelling and sound design though. Both are just as good as they've been hyped up to be. I just wish they were done in service of a movie that had more to say.