Juliet Stevenson gives a typically excellent performance of bottled up shame and guilt as a woman haunted by the sins of her mother in this low-budget British drama. It’s loosely inspired by the true story of Helga Schneider, whose mother Traudi abandoned her family in 1941 to work as a guard in Auschwitz.
In real life, Helga settled in Italy; in the film she travels from London to Vienna with her granddaughter for a deathbed confrontation with unrepentant Traudi (chillingly played by Karin Bertling). The film is a little rough around the edges and occasionally lacks subtlety, but there is a powerful scene in which Traudi begs her great-granddaughter to try on her old SS uniform, which she has kept like a treasured wedding dress in the wardrobe all these years.
