Lore

Southern Germany in the spring of 1945: 15-year-old Lore's (Saskia Rosendahl) life is shaken to its foundations when her parents, high-ranking Nazis, are arrested. No help can be expected from the neighbours, so Lore decides to travel with her younger siblings Liesel (Nele Trebs), Günter (André Frid) and Jürgen (Mika Seidel) on her own to visit their grandmother in the north. But the way there proves to be not only extremely difficult, but also highly dangerous. Because the country lies in ruins and is divided into different sectors, through which there is hardly a passage without a pass. Even though Lore still firmly believes in what her parents have taught her, she still has doubts on the difficult way to the north, which she doesn't really know how to deal with. When the somewhat older Thomas (Kai Malina) joins the small group and helps them through an American military checkpoint with papers that identify him as a Jewish concentration camp survivor, her world view is finally shaken. But there is still an end to their long, hard journey.

With Lore, an adaptation of the novel The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert, Australian director Cate Shortland (Somersault) has staged an oppressive wartime drama that takes a very intimate, and thus all the more intense, look at the end of the Nazi regime in Germany. Filming took place in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, Hamburg, Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, where cinematographer Adam Arkapaw captured some fascinating images that enhance the already engaging action. Although the visual style of the film is at times very reminiscent of that of Terrence Malick and most especially The Narrow Ridge, this does little to diminish the intensity of the images, which are only trumped by the enormously strong acting of lead actress Saskia Rosendahl.

The young actress embodies with tremendous strength the girl who firmly believes in the ideals instilled in her by her parents, even though the world as she sees it is falling apart around her. While her younger siblings have just maintained their childishness in the beginning, Lore, at 15, is already a surrogate mother of sorts, trying not only to keep the children safe, but also to pass on her ideals. She can't explain why other people are hostile to her, nor can she explain the doubts that awaken in her and grow stronger and stronger in the course of the long journey. It may be that Lore has lost her childhood and her parents, but in the end she seems to gain something through all the losses. Saskia Rosendahl succeeds very well in making this inner journey believably comprehensible. Through her acting, the audience understands that Lore is, in her own way, also just a victim of the Nazis and that she first has to learn to develop her own thoughts, actually even her own ego.

The journey there is at times extremely hard and also brutal, although some of the somewhat bloodier moments would not have been absolutely necessary to achieve the desired effect. Also, the heaviness that lies on the whole story weighs a bit too strained at times. Surely, light-hearted sayings or even humor would have been completely out of place here. Lore doesn't tell a cheerful, but a very dramatic story from a tragic time. Still, a little lightening up here and there with a smile or some palpable humanity would have certainly been helpful to make the film seem a little less unwieldy. No question, Cate Shortland has succeeded in making a good and intense film. But a story like this would have deserved to be accessible to a wider audience. And that's just not the case in this form, because at the end of the day, most viewers, even if they appreciate sophisticated art house cinema, don't want to go on a completely bleak and gloomy journey. Sure, there is something like a glimmer of hope at the end of the film, something positive that you're happy to take away. But the journey there is just too hard, too bleak, to open itself up to more than a small niche audience. But if you're happy to take on challenges like this and aren't afraid of almost crushing dramatic weight, you'll be rewarded by a terrifically filmed and even more powerfully acted film whose story will linger in your mind for a long time to come. Worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp