Critics reviews

Set in the eponymous, impoverished hamlet of the erstwhile East, the film is a spare, smart reworking of James M. Cain’s paradigmatic (and frequently adapted) 1934 noir novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Part of Jerichow’s appeal lies in its meta-cinematic move, the way it inserts itself as a kind of corrective into a particular lineage of film history.

With Jerichow, Petzold made one of the most complex and challenging depictions of immigration in recent European cinema, one well woven into both his auteurist interests and the tattered fabric of contemporary eastern Germany.

American audiences, expecting the Hollywood treatment, may be put off at first by Petzold's comparatively austere rendering. But this filmmaker is not interested in doomed love or the element of chance in human life. He's not overly impressed by sexual passion, either, and doesn't think that lust makes its own rules or any of that other movie kid stuff... This is a movie made by and for adults, and adults should consider seeing it.

It’s as though Petzold had crushed “The Postman Always Rings Twice” against “The Grapes of Wrath,” film noir against the parched hopes of the Depression, and transplanted what was left to an unregarded corner of northern Europe, where the sunshine feels like a cruel joke.

Petzold, who has a crisp style and sharp sense of the visual, is too talented and imaginative to allow his film to become predictable. Rather, “Jerichow” offers implicit, sardonic social comment as well as a compelling playing out of the eternal triangle.

No one in “Jerichow” is entirely deserving of sympathy, which gives the film a detached, clinical feeling underlined by the director’s habit of observing emotions rather than evoking them... But there is nonetheless something haunting about this film, a sense of desperation and defeat that seems less like a generic convention than like a genuine insight, an intuition into what can happen at the crossroads of lust, loneliness and materialism.

Jerichow’s sparseness, tiny cast, and minimal plot can make the film seem a little elusive, but there’s a certain elegance to Petzold’s concision, too. He shows all he wants us to see.

For such a reticent movie, Jerichow has a penchant to tell, not show, during key moments... Jerichow is never persuasive as a movie, but certainly has enough material for someone’s postcolonial studies dissertation.

Petzold’s film succeeds most as a character study... [but] The film’s main problem is that its protagonists too often act out of character just to move the narrative forward.