Labyrinth of Lies Film Still
It begins as a casual encounter between strangers. Simon asks for a light and Schulz obliges, extending his cigarette lighter through the iron rails of a schoolyard. But when Simon looks up, terror fills his face. The schoolteacher offering the lighter is no stranger; he was an SS guard at Auschwitz and Simon was a prisoner.
The German selection for the 2015 Academy Awards, Labyrinth of Lies, is set in late-1950s West Germany, a land of renewed prosperity, political stability and short memory. Some Germans refused to believe the death camp stories, dismissing them as Allied propaganda. For many younger Germans, Auschwitz was as far away as Mars, and less familiar. Some never knew what happened and others preferred to forget. The Allies had put the leading survivors of the Nazi regime on trial, but what about the millions of minions who carried out their orders? Some of the worst perpetrators were hiding in plain sight at a time when the Holocaust was a subject seldom mentioned—in the U.S. and much less in Germany.
Loosely adapted from actual events, Labyrinth of Lies concerns the efforts of a crusading journalist (André Szymanski) to bring the Schulz case to the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office. In this telling, no one wants to listen except the youngest, lowest man in the prosecuting team, Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling). Perhaps Radmann is motivated at first by a punctilious attitude toward the law. He had just refused a judge’s request to lower a young woman’s fine for speeding, so how could he pass on a murder charge? However, the gravity and scope of his investigation dawns on Radmann soon enough; after a while, he may even be afflicted with a bad case of self-righteous self-flagellation.
Labyrinth of Lies depicts Radmann’s initially lonely quest to find justice for Simon and eventually for all victims of Auschwitz. His colleagues snicker, the police eye him condescendingly and even his secretary glowers with silent disapproval. Only the Prosecutor General, a Jewish exile who had returned to Germany after the Nazi defeat, backs him. Radmann enters a labyrinth in search of monsters, a twisting series of dark passages that often dead end in the silence of witnesses and the stonewalling of officials.
The plotline advances along predictable movie lines. Radmann falls in love with the woman with the speeding ticket (Friederike Becht), who turns out to be friends with the crusading journalist—and of course, her father is overheard singing Nazi fight songs. The melodrama is unnecessary and unworthy of the larger story, which concerns how to measure culpability in a nation whose regime deliberately massacred a class of its own citizens and extended the extermination across the European continent. Many of the perpetrators pursued by Radmann seem like nice guys, ordinary men. How did they become death camp guards?
Labyrinth of Lies
3 stars
Starring Alexander Fehling, Friederike Becht
Directed by Giulio Ricciarelli
Rated R
