Critics reviews

Past intersects with present like needle pulling thread; Hitchcock crosses paths with Fassbinder; gaze is met with unseeing gaze. Countries, marriages, human beings: any whole that's come asunder, says Phoenix, must first endure fire if it's going to be rebuilt.

Classical form in cinema still has its uses. Petzold's survivor tragedy tells a story that's squalid and irrational in equal measure, and tells it with measured, masterly detachment. Killer ending.

I didn't see a better performance in 2015 than the one Nina Hoss delivers in Christian Petzold's spellbinding noir melodrama, a peak achievement in one of the most remarkable director-actor pairings in recent movies. As a Holocaust survivor searching for answers amid the rubble of a bombed-out Berlin, Hoss reshapes her character's face into a scarred canvas of pain and political meaning.

Seemingly self-deluded, the heroine delivers a coup de grâce that, despite its subtlety, still sears as an indictment of a nation's pathologies.

The film is in a way a homage to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, not only due to its visual excess (which is to be attributed to Hans Fromm's captivating cinematography) and the melodramatic tropes, but also because Ronald Zehrfeld's striking physical resemblance to theenfant terrible of New German Cinema. The film also includes echoes of Liliana Cavani's masterpiece The Night Porter. Nina Hoss' performance as Nelly is mesmerising.

Christian Petzold's Phoenix is a powerful reminder that we all face the world in more ways than one. Emphatically predicated on the power of the visage, Phoenix underscores the extent to which the human countenance simultaneously grants a sense of personal identity-cum-integrity and the means to communicate this publicly: our individual features are a present that allows us to present ourselves to other people.

Together, [Hoss and Petzold] have one of the most intuitive, mutually inquisitive director-star collaborations going in contemporary cinema. It says much for their joint oeuvre that Phoenix isn't their finest hour, for it's still a very fine hour (and 38 minutes) indeed.

Phoenix is so strong in its particulars that by the time the final scene comes (and it is a doozy) you have been waiting for something like this, hoping for something like this, the tension of Hoss' performance is so great, with its silent quivering unbearable withholding … and yet the reality of the final moment, as it unfolds, as Hoss and Zehrfeld perform it, what actually happens, in other words, is far more powerful and heart-stopping than anything you or I could dream up.

Rather than being about revenge, Phoenix is about denial: from its surreal premise (a man who cannot recognize his own wife), through its poignant unfolding (a woman who cannot admit the truth about her husband's motivation), to its disturbing denouement (a world that masks the horror of the camps with the idealized image of a returned survivor). It's not the film but the characters who live immersed in fantasies. Phoenix is simply the space where all these fantasies intertwine.

To watch Phoenix is to be put in the position of an investigator analyzing the psychological import of the most microscopic of gestures. Historical insight and cinematic sophistication, coexisting in a tight bind that puts neither on a platform, rarely synchronize with such tremendous grace.

There's no point in explaining where all of this goes. But Petzold is in command of it. By the time you know what he's up to, the movie's over, and you're in a stupor. The ending's brilliantly abrupt. Petzold continues the German tradition of melodrama that Rainer Werner Fassbinder took up during his peak, in the 1970s and '80.

In one of the film's slyest and subtlest conceits, the more [Nelly] enacts this false return to her "true" self, the further away she gets from the person she once was. And this is the key to Nina Hoss's magnificent, tremulous performance: at every moment, she appears as though she's emotionally freefalling, meanwhile feverishly sorting through layers of meaning and truth about herself, her husband, and her home country.