Tony Gussin

This has the feel of a low budget TV movie or a rather earnest but not very good student film. It’s not completely terrible but the acting comes across as fairly mechanical and the whole thing moves along at a perfunctory box ticking rate. If you’re going to do a holocaust movie, on one of the most terrible, tragic and evil episodes of human history, you need to make the viewer feel those emotions and immerse them in that atmosphere of horror and tragedy. This doesn’t do that, there’s very little feeling apart from a few fleeting moments. Minor spoiler alert: The testimony from one real life survivor at the end imparts more emotion and feeling than the rest of the film put together. It is set in the early days of the death camps so you wouldn’t expect to see the wholesale horror and scale of what came later, but for me it lacks any real empathy. The writers may have done better to follow a few characters from the beginning of their arrival at the camp rather than picking things up somewhere in the middle, then backfilling the narrative with rather clumsy dialogue and exposition. As said, it is not entirely terrible and is watchable, so worth two stars, but what film all the five star reviewers were watching I honestly don’t know - there are far far better holocaust films out there.