After being left for dead by the Nazis in the closing days of the war, disfigured concentration camp survivor Nelly (Nina Hoss) undergoes reconstructive surgery, emerging from her bandages with a new face. When Nelly meets estranged husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) in a Berlin club, he fails to recognise her, but sees enough similarity with the wife he believes to be dead to enlist “Esther” in a scam – posing as Nelly in order to access her valuable estate. Thus begins a noirish game of cat and mouse as Johnny unknowingly instructs our heroine on how to impersonate herself, while she struggles to divine signs of affection or betrayal in his demeanour.
Inspired by Hubert Monteilhet’s Le retour des cendres (upon which novel J Lee Thompson’s 1965 film Return from the Ashes was based), Phoenix nods toward Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Wolfgang Petersen’s Shattered as it spins its web of mistaken identity and psychological intrigue. But beneath the playful genre trappings lurks something much darker – an investigation of guilty memory and wishful forgetfulness in the wake of unspeakable national horror. Director Christian Petzold has described Johnny as “the ‘new’ German who wants to change guilt into money”, and the duplicitous relationships on which Phoenix pivots can clearly be read as political rather than personal. In her sixth collaboration with Petzold, Hoss is typically terrific, bringing the character of Nelly (back) to life with mercurial aplomb, the strength of her performance carrying us over the implausibilities of the plot.
