Never Look Away (2018)

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck returns with three hours of German suffering, and he means every minute of them. A boy named Kurt watches his aunt Elisabeth play Bach, deliver a bouquet to Hitler, and then come apart at the seams. The diagnosis is schizophrenia. The remedy is sterilization and, shortly after, death by the Nazi euthanasia program. The doctor who signs the order is an SS gynecologist named Seeband, who will later become the father of the woman Kurt loves. The film treats these horrors as history, which is what they are, and it lets the audience draw its own breath.

The cultural inventory here is thin. The cast is German and white throughout, with no color-conscious gesture anywhere in the frame. No character is gay, no romance bends away from the heterosexual template, and no environmental anxiety intrudes on the rubble of Dresden. What the film does offer is Elisabeth, whose illness is drawn with genuine sympathy, a portrait of a mind the state found inconvenient and therefore expendable. The women in this story are sterilized, aborted, and managed by men, but the camera frames their pain as atrocity, not as a thesis about patriarchy. Seeband and the socialist-realist art bureaucracy take their lumps, yet nobody in the film proposes that wealth is the problem. The problem is power, and the film has been reading about it since 1937.

Then there is the awkward matter of Gerhard Richter, whose biography supplied the bones and who has since described the result as an abuse and a gross distortion of his life. The film wears his trauma without his consent, which is a curious position for a work so concerned with truth and beauty. It carries the gravity of a nineteenth-century salon painting: earnest, handsome, faintly sermonizing about art and memory. But its sermon is an old one, about totalitarianism and the soul, delivered without the vocabulary of any current movement. It is a serious film, and serious is not the same as contemporary.