Inspired by the book “Voices from Beneath the Ashes,” featuring eyewitness accounts by Sonderkommando who buried their testimonies, Nemes was able to ground his narrative (shot in 35 mm), in the authentic, tangible everyday functioning of what he calls a “death factory.” Nemes’ tightly-focused camera follows the Sonderkommando’s blinkered close-up point-of-view as he does the Nazis’ dirty work in the crematoria and moves through the camp seeking to bury a young boy. He immerses the audience in the action by placing them close to the subjective points-of-view of his characters’ experiences on land, sea, and air (within varying timeframes) throughout the 1940 evacuation of 400,000 British and Allied soldiers stranded on the beach at Dunkirk, France, surrounded by enemy forces. “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug,” reads the quotation that opens the film, and Kathryn Bigelow spends the next two hours underscoring both the lethality and addictiveness of combat.
Author: Michael Nordine
Published at: 2025-04-09 23:00:00
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