Anthropoid (2016)

Sean Ellis has made a film about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, and he has made it the old way: mud, rain, a jammed Sten gun, and a great deal of hurrying through Prague in a hat. Two Czechoslovak soldiers, played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, parachute into an occupied homeland, move into a stranger's flat, and spend much of the runtime waiting for the go-ahead to kill a man. The film is patient to a fault. It is also, by any measure available to the modern classifier, inert. Nothing in it strains toward the present tense.

The women here are couriers and sweethearts. They die badly, and the film does not pause to explain their significance. The cast is European and white because the people who did this were European and white. The enemy is Nazism, treated as a settled matter of fact instead of a debate to be won. There is no speech, no anachronism, no moment when a character turns to the lens and instructs us on how to feel about the twentieth century. The last stand in the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius runs a long, brutal stretch, staged with the grim procedural care of a documentary about drainage.

This is a war picture of the older school. It wants to be accurate, it is accurate, and it asks nothing further of us. The result is somber, well acted, and almost entirely free of contemporary instruction. A viewer raised on moral footnotes may find the silence suspicious. It is not silence. It is the past, left where it was, which is a rarer achievement than it ought to be.