The Captain

The stark beauty of Florian Ballhaus’s black-and-white cinematography and painterly framing can’t conceal the ugliness that unfolds as the death toll mounts and Herold starts to believe his own grotesque creation.

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.

Does the man make the uniform, or does the uniform make the man? Schwentke's conclusion is as dark as you may fear.

The film-craft is high quality, with the passion and care taken evident. Schwentke brings the brutal winter during wartime to realistic life. If you have historical interest in deep details of the war, or are fascinated by psychopathic war criminals, this might be a film for you.

The movie’s an artfully sustained guessing game, tense and rarely dull. It’s also afflicted with a jokey, jaunty tone as deliberate as it is limiting.

It’s too bleak to laugh at and too absurd to cry over. That it’s true adds another insanity-inducing element.

In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.