It’s a film that takes the entirety of its running time to archive (including the fantastic use of The Talking Heads on the closing credits with the throat-grabbing “Road to Nowhere”) – genius irony
Kafkaesque in its futility (I think a bit like Lucrecia Martel’s Zama in 2017)—form and repetition—the same restaurants, streets, ships, vocabulary “cleansing”, we’re talking about passports, and consulates, embassy, seedy hotels, bars, police sirens— it’s form and fragmentation
Casablanca meets 1984—or Children of Men– but it’s not a visual triumph which is a shame with the strength of the formal achievement some of the strong ideas
A ghost story like Phoenix– Petzold’s 2014 film
We have a really observational third or fourth tier character as the voice-over narration—
Quite brilliantly, the film puts the Nazi’s story of immigrant in the modern day—this is s timeless horror film – it’s like the past and present have intertwined
It takes a while to get on its wavelength—opaque and challenging
Marseille, a port city, is a true character in the film
Franz Rogowski, in just about every scene, is like a young Joaquin Phoenix and I don’t mean that just in physical description—he’s very good here in this largely internalized performance
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