Collaborating once more with Harun Farocki and lead actor Nina Hoss, Christian Petzold (Barbara) carefully crafts this cleverly plotted, smotheringly suspenseful post-WW2 drama. An especially impressive combination of throwback thriller and genre elements with substantial thematic weight.

Christian Petzold displayed a rare gift for genre subversion from the very start. At once a coming-of-age tale and terrorists-on-the-run thriller, his debut feature uses the former to comment on the latter—its mutable young protagonist serving as a proxy for a nation surveying its traumatic past.