Interview: Daniel Kasman | Video: Kurt Walker
One of the year's biggest surprises, Robert Schwentke's The Captain marks an abrupt turn for the German-born director of big budget Hollywood films like RED, R.I.P.D., and two films in the Divergent trilogy. The filmmaker returns to his native country to film what can only be described as a bold provocation, though hardly a flippant one. The Captain re-tells the true story of Willi Herold, a German soldier in the Second World War who gets separated from his unit—or possibly deserts—whereupon he finds an officer's uniform, puts it on, and finds the authority it imports not only a passkey to survival but thrillingly empowering. What follows is a continual escalation of this charade—which builds upon itself as other soldiers, many abjectly horrible, join Herold's ersatz mission—where this blank-faced soldier, about whom we pointedly know nothing, grows from a panicky man desperately fleeing through the landscape to a leader and murderer organizing and encouraging violence and terror. According to curator and critic Olaf Möller, The Captain is unprecedented in the history of Germany for showcasing the story of a perpetrator, and indeed Schwentke's is not an easy film to watch but nevertheless reveals a necessary perspective. Its engrossing combination of the realism of Herold's picaresque journey to complete moral degradation with war's absurdity portrayed as a murderous masquerade of roleplaying power games may be ghastly, but such things need to be filmed, watched, and better known.