Review: A daring escape and a quest to expose the Third Reich propel ‘The Auschwitz Report’
LA TimesThe Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. The immersive historical drama “The Auschwitz Report,” Slovakia’s submission for the 2020 international film Oscar, tells yet another true-life Holocaust-era tale of courage and daring with harrowing and deeply affecting results. Director Peter Bebjak, who wrote the film’s tense, propulsive script with Jozef Pastéka and Tomás Bombík, vividly re-creates several weeks in April 1944 in which Slovak Jewish prisoners Alfred Wetzler and Walter Rosenberg plotted and executed a death-defying escape from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The film’s first two acts follow Wetzler and Rosenberg as they disappear from sight and hide for days in a nightmarishly claustrophobic, plank-covered ditch awaiting their best chance to break out of the camp. Performances are gripping and lifelike all around, with Scottish actor John Hannah appearing near the end as a Red Cross representative, whom Wetzler and Rosenberg must convince, using detailed notes they’d kept, of the systematic horrors occurring at Hitler’s extermination camps.
History of this topic
How should cinema tackle the horror of the Holocaust?
Hindustan Times
Auschwitz Untold: New Holocaust documentary presents horrors of Nazi concentration camp in vivid colour
The Independent
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
Slate
Don’t Give an Oscar to The Reader
SlateDiscover Related