Wow, I was in tears for almost the entire last five minutes of this film. And it's funny, because after reading many of the reviews of Phoenix, I was really anticipating an extraordinarily executed ending, something truly special - and my god, that's exactly what I received x 1,000. Beyond the masterful suspense that the film retains throughout the duration of its runtime, it's also strong thematically. There are the obvious themes of war and the Holocaust and the notion of returning from a concentration camp, but the more abstract themes that it presents are equally as fascinating. I enjoy the way Phoenix, much like the recent Under the Skin, approaches the idea of surfaces and what is beneath them,…

Petzold brilliantly merges a European Holocaust drama art style with an emotionally perverse face-swapping Hitchcockian premise where a concentration camp survivor has reconstructive plastic surgery (that makes her look a little like the Berlin cabaret singer she used to but not completely) is reunited with her husband who may or may not have turned her into the Nazis, and doesn't recognize who she is but sees enough of an off-brand doppelganger in her to suggest they collaborate on a Vertigo scheme to play dress up and pose her as his dead wife so they can claim her family inheritance she is owed following their deaths during the war.

A truly harrowing dynamic forming between the two where she attempts to…

“I am alive and will return soon.”

I was born, and then I died. It was but a moment to the world; the world took no notice. And so I sought to be born once more, that I might be noticed. For, like most people, all I wanted was to be seen, if only for a moment.

To reconstruct my life was not what I wanted. Reconstruction was the wrong word, implying rubble, the piecing together of a sad approximation from the remnants of something better. Not reconstruction—recreation. Something new, but the same. Something fresh and alive, redolent not of the past but of my desire for what the past might have been.

But it was not to be. And…

88/100

Phoenix, in a word, is spellbinding. I was shaken awake by its haunting melodies throughout the soundtrack and a splendid evocation of post-war Berlin. However, its fascinating central relationship, performed beautifully by Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld, avoids the typical thriller roles of mystery and intrigue. Comparisons to Hitchcock's Vertigo have been tossed around, but it isn't just to point out the surface similarities.

Phoenix, in a tantalizing way, buries its sexuality far lower than Hitchcock would've ever dared, and the tragic playfulness of the entire story feels rooted in an entire history of Hitchcockian horror. The audience knows everything, but that sudden reaction of shock comes just as swift as an unknown surprise. It is this way of…

“It’s a metaphorical movie and it’s also not a metaphorical movie.” - Harun Farocki

The comparisons to Vertigo are apt, but also silly & probably missing the point. Clearly this is inspired by Vertigo, absolutely. But Vertigo, in fact no film by Hitchcock, is quite as political as this.

Outstanding, a reflection on 20th Century Germany and also on the nature of fiction-performance-narrative, making this a film equally past and present. It’s remarkable how condensed yet complex this is, without leaving classical narrative means. A truth becomes lie, then almost truth, then lie again, before finally truth. And in the meantime we see a Germany which wants to forget the Holocaust, pretend it never existed, (in-fact, most of this movie is…