Critics reviews

In Between Worlds, writer-director Feo Aladag’s supposedly “gritty” but hopelessly predictable Afghanistan drama, drifted from the mind even before it was over.

If the film has a singularly revealing gesture – as Brecht used to locate a Gestus at the intersection of individual comportment and the social-political context ¬– it would be Jesper holding his head in downward cast, perhaps trying to massage out the confusion, and soon desperation, that their futile assignment leaves him. Inbetween Worlds is the unusual war film because there is relatively little extended combat and almost no fetishisation of its weaponry

Everything about Inbetween Worlds (Zwischen Welten)—screenplay, casting (as much as I generally admire the work of Ronald Zehrfeld and Burghart Klaußner), direction, pace, everything, is wrong, off, disastrous. Inbetween Worlds doesn’t even earn the critic’s standard mercy killing, “well-intentioned.”

Sensitive if over-schematic, this story of the gradual alliance between a German military unit, the Kunduz village they are assigned to protect and the young interpreter who binds them takes great pains to be fair to all non-Taliban parties in the equation — though it also avoids presenting any one character with a complex moral decision to make.