Critics reviews

A shaky, unconvincing historical drama... Whatever the facts about Hitler’s food tasters, the film doesn’t feel artistically truthful.

Carefully crafted in its period recreation and modest in its formal ambitions... Soldini’s film brings to light a largely forgotten corner of Nazi history... At its best, The Tasters works as a gateway into that strange and unsettling historical footnote.

Once you sit down at the table and are ready to be served some unique, surprising, and impressive drama, The Tasters delivers it all with a side order of realism and a stein of cold, filtered humanity.

While Wölk's account and Postorino's novel certainly would allow for an over-the-top sentimental treatment... the film thankfully keeps things mostly understated and rooted in realism... [The choice] makes the characters, female and male, believable, which helps with keeping the story interesting.

Soldini spends much of the film observing the women as they get to know one another. Although it has its share of dramatic events, he is at his best when observing details like the way the women look at each other when they’ve first been rounded up and are assuming that a different fate awaits them.

During the first half of the film Soldini’s work as writer and director is adroitly judged. In the latter capacity he proves to be unobtrusive but always directs well and his screenplay sets the right tone... [yet] in its last quarter the film becomes a drama which has no deep connection to the film’s raison d’être.

There’s a feeling that The Tasters has dialled down the drama of the situation a little too much, missing an opportunity to fuse the high-concept dilemma with the circumstances that are emotionally and physically breaking its characters.

In his first period drama, shot in German, Soldini focuses above all on the point of view of women, respecting the novel and the screenplay that centres around the sisterhood of women who, within a great, ruthless totalitarian collective deception collapsing miserably, suffer for being involved in that merciless male hallucination.