Despite exploitative dodginess, plot-holes the size of Saturn’s rings and an ending pinched from Ben Affleck’s Argo, this movie deserves some points for addressing a little-known dysfunctional horror in Chile’s Pinochet era. Some time after the war, Chile had become home to the Colonia Dignidad, a spartan religious community founded by a German émigré: former Wehrmacht officer and Hitler Youth veteran Paul Schäfer. It was actually a prison camp with barbed wire fences and watchtowers enclosing a Teutonic cult-kingdom involving child abuse, which furthermore put itself enthusiastically at the service of the Pinochet regime, spiriting away its prisoners and torture victims – itself becoming part of the torture.
Florian Gallenberger’s well-meaning movie imagines a liberal German couple Lena (Emma Watson) and Daniel (Daniel Brühl) who get caught up in the events of 1973: pro-Allende agitator Daniel is tortured and sent to Colonia Dignidad under the rule of Schäfer (Michael Nyquist). Lena somehow finds out that it is possible that he has been sent there and with no more than this whispered grapevine guess, shows up posing as a would-be novitiate, intending to infiltrate the cult and find Daniel. Fortunately, her gamble is correct; then she deliberately draws attention to herself by rule-breakingly swimming naked so that a public punishment will alert him to her presence. More wild implausibilities follow. Very silly stuff: but of some value as a quasi-historical footnote.
