4) Phoenix
Demure but pulpy, fraught but subdued, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a tensely sustained identity crisis. Returning to post-war Berlin after dramatic facial reconstruction, Holocaust survivor Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss, in the year’s most heart-rending performance) comes home to a man and a city that want nothing more than to forget the recent past. Unrecognizable to the husband that may have betrayed her to the Nazis, Nelly’s desperate plan to reclaim what’s been lost mirrors an international reckoning with the aftermath of World War II.
A noir melodrama that freely plays on each genre’s use of colour, costuming, lighting, and staging, Petzold’s latest is a handsome production where the baroque and the austere are unconventional bedfellows. But there’s sorrow and rage crying out beneath the stately put-on, a lowly resonating banshee’s wail that Phoenix carries all the way through to its breathtaking, haunting finale.