Australian Cate Shortland’s second film is a raw fairy tale about Nazi Germany, where indoctrinated, newly teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has always loved her war hero daddy. But when he returns from his SS unit’s long Belarus rampage in 1945, both parents are seized by the Allies, and she has to lead her abandoned siblings into the forest, to find their grandmother’s house.
When Thomas (Kai Malina), bearing a concentration camp tattoo, offers help and erotic temptation, Jenny Agutter’s Walkabout odyssey with her brother and Aboriginal guide comes to mind. But for Lore, adolescent longing crashes into anti-Semitism imbibed almost with mother’s milk. This is a Nazi who can’t know any better, not even knowing Nazi Germany has been wiped from the map.
“You must remember who you are,” Lore insists to her charges, like English aristocrats down to their last crust. It could be a magician’s trigger to snap free of hypnosis too, or a psychiatrist returning the repressed. Clues of horror litter the forest they wander through like swastika-warped Hansels and Gretels. The adult estate Lore’s blooming body and mind are driving her towards is a charnel-house. The lips of her lovely, Aryan-ideal face crack, bleed and scab as she walks, like she’s rotting from the inside.
Rosendahl’s fine performance mixes ideological certainty and teenage confusion, responsible courage, hate and collapse. Shortland’s use of drippingly fertile nature seems overplayed, but makes sense in retrospect. This is a hugely sensual and thoughtful film about a fever breaking.
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