Critics reviews

Filming in faux-documentary black-and-white, the writer and director, Robert Schwentke, creates decoratively illustrative images to depict unspeakable horrors in fulsome detail. Despite one clever scene, in which Willi and the camp commander duel for power in telephone calls to Nazi officials, the movie is nearly devoid of psychology, context, and ideas.

As much integrity as “The Captain” has, it’s also subject to some glibness. The movie seems at times a little too pleased with itself and its mordant observations on humanity, which reach their apogee in the film’s coda, which lets Hubacher, in full costume as Willi, loose in the Germany of today.

“The Captain,” Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.

Herold's stasis as a character is pointed, intended to existentially emphasize humankind's primordial capacity for selfishness and arbitrary cruelty, but this reduction also flatters audiences by playing into the cliché of the Nazi as an unfeeling monster.

Parable, historical reckoning and pitch-black comedy, The Captain is clever, well-crafted, and utterly grueling.

The film ultimately manages to pose questions about Germany in the present as much as it makes us wonder about the very circumstances that enabled this strange, indeed grotesque story to take place in 1945.

It pushes the unbelievable power and myth of Herold’s real status right through to his conviction, when a judge tries to make the absurd argument that Herold’s success is actually admirable and exactly what the Nazi party needed to succeed. This is a film that fully understands the psychology of the German soldiers and offers unflinching, timeless truth.