Very rarely comes a thriller, so gripping, psychologically complex and utterly shocking in its denouement, it saps the breath out of your lungs.
Phoenix, directed by Christian Petzold and loosely based on Hubert Monteilhet's detective novel
Le Retour des cendres, is one such. Nelly (played by a superb Nina Hoss), a German-Jewish ex-cabaret singer, returns to a post World War II Berlin, having survived a concentration camp, scarred, disfigured, much like the city, which has been ravaged by war. She undergoes a surgical facial reconstruction, like a city picking up from the ruins, but the result is so different, unlike her previous self, that she's unable to recognise the face, likewise the city, resurrected, like a
phoenix, staring back at her from a piece of broken glass. Neither does her husband Johnny for that matter, though he finds her uncannily similar to his
wife. But rather than revealing it to him that she indeed is his significant other, she plays along with him, embarking on an attempt to masquerade as his
wife, thus impersonating herself, and help him obtain her inheritance, as she slowly begins to realise that her own husband might be the one to betray her Jewish roots to the Nazis, the very reason for her present ruined state. Combining ideas of personal and national identity in the aftermath of war, director Petzold weaves a chilling psychodrama, building into a climax that's perfect and heart-stopping.
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