Movies You Might Have Missed: Christian Petzold's Phoenix

This gripping noir with more than a hint of ‘Vertigo’ will leave you guessing until the final scene

Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor who has been disfigured by a bullet wound in ‘Phoenix’ (Rex)

Director Christian Petzold and actress Nina Hoss have collaborated on six films, the most recent of which was 2014’s Phoenix, a gripping noir with more than a hint of Vertigo. Viewers irritated by the glaring plot holes in that Alfred Hitchcock picture would do well to avoid Phoenix but those more concerned with universal truths than narrative credibility will be rewarded with one of the most audacious psychodramas in living memory.

The action takes place in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Hoss plays Nelly, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor who has been disfigured by a bullet wound. She visits a reconstructive surgeon and asks to look exactly as she once did but is disappointed with the final result. Nelly seeks out her gentile husband despite the possibility that he betrayed her to the Nazis but he fails to recognise her and then, in an overt nod to Vertigo, asks her to impersonate his wife.

Some will quibble with the logic of such events but is it any less believable than what was happening in the concentration camps all over Europe at the time? Petzold is astute enough to realise that credulity is not an issue in a film that takes place so soon after the protagonist’s liberation from Auschwitz, a place at which the unimaginable was occurring with startling and horrific regularity.

Forty-five minutes before filming would start, Hoss opted to disengage from the rest of the cast and crew in a bid to channel her character’s sense of total isolation. The result is a flawless, layered performance from an actress with the kind of old-world Hollywood glamour Hitchcock was so keen on.

This is a holocaust film like no other in so much as it concerns the after-effects of trauma without ever showing us the horrors of the war years. Petzold treats the audience likes adults and takes it as read that we have seen the horrific images elsewhere so there is no need for manipulative shots of Auschwitz prisoners intended only to provoke a visceral response. The city of Berlin seems every bit as much of a husk as the heroine but it is shot with such an expressionistic beauty that Phoenix is utterly mesmerising and leaves the viewer guessing until the final scene, one of the most haunting and unforgettable in recent cinema. Suspend your disbelief and this film will leave you reeling with the inescapable conclusion that life ain’t a cabaret.