Phoenix (2014)

Directed by

Christian Petzold

Genre

drama film

Country

Germany, Poland

Runtime

1h 38m

Rated

PG-13

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 492 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

After surviving a concentration camp, a Jewish woman returns to Berlin with a reconstructed face. She seeks out her husband who does not recognize her, setting off a story of identity and deception.

tensemelancholicslow-burnunsettlingsuspensefulsomberambiguousbleak

What happens

Phoenix is a 2014 German melodrama war film directed by Christian Petzold. Loosely adapted from the 1961 novel Le Retour des Cendres (English: The Return from the Ashes) by French author Hubert Monteilhet, the film stars Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld as Nelly and Johnny Lenz, respectively. Phoenix is set in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, where Nelly, a Jewish woman who managed to survive Auschwitz concentration camp, decides to go back to her husband Johnny in Berlin. She has had to have her face reconstructed owing to a bullet wound, and her husband does not recognize her. The film marks the sixth collaboration between Petzold and Hoss, as well as being the second film in which Hoss and Zehrfeld star opposite each other, after Barbara (2012), also directed by Petzold. Phoenix was released in Germany on 25 September 2014, and in the United States on 24 July 2015. The film received widespread critical acclaim, with praise for the film's suspenseful narrative, for its direction, for Hoss's performance, and for its production design and symbolic ambiguous elements. The film was released on Blu-ray and DVD in North America by The Criterion Collection on 26 April 2016. It has been widely assessed as one of the best movies of its decade. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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