Butler's Cinema Scene

Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina

“LORE”  My rating: B (Opening May 3 at )109 minutes | No MPAA rating

You’re born into a world of privilege and comfort. You grow up thinking you’re superior, that you’re entitled to all the good that comes your way.

And then it ends. Abruptly and forever.

That’s the situation facing five German children in “Lore,” Cate Shortland’s quietly devastating tale of siblings struggling to survive in the last days of World War II.

From the time of their births Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), Liesl (Nele Trebs), Gunther (Andre Frid) and Jurgen (Mika Seidel) have lived a blessed existence as the children of a high-ranking Nazi official. 

Now their father (Hans-Jochen Wagner) has returned to kiss them goodbye. The war is lost. The Americans, Russians and British are advancing and Papa’s work in the concentration camps makes him a marked man.

The children’s mother (Ursina Lardi) has become unhinged by the realization that her beloved Third Reich is going down in flames. A specialist in eugenics, she begins burning her research, which calls for the killing of the mentally underdeveloped and the malformed.

Before she vanishes, Mama tells the oldest child, 14-year-old Lore, that she is now in charge. She is to lead her brothers and sisters – including baby Peter, who is still in diapers – across hundreds of miles of war-torn country and take refuge on the farm of their grandmother. And she warns that they should avoid soldiers, since “They kill children.”

Director Shortland and co-writer Robin Mukherjee (adapting Rachel Seiffert’s novel) are of the show-don’t-tell school. The dialogue is in German with English subtitles, but even without the subtitles you’d know what’s going on simply through the visuals.

To a large degree the film is about how the brutal realities of their situation break down the children’s solid Nazi standards.  The two boys aren’t that far from feral to begin with and their exposure to dead bodies and forest living quickly brings out their wild sides.

But Lore is a tougher sell.  She has drunk often of Herr Hitler’s Kool-Aid and is a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Master Race. So when the family gains a traveling companion – Thomas (Kai Malina), fresh from a prison camp and carrying papers that identify him as a Jew – Lore is torn between her desperate need for an ally and the revulsion and hatred generated by this scrawny “subhuman.”

There’s some very heavy stuff going on here, but “Lore,” is remarkably free of conventional melodrama. Despite some close escapes, a tragic death, and various encounters with fellow Germans whose attitudes range from the saintly to the mercenary, the film is completely rooted in reality.

Largely this is due to Rosendahl, a 20-year-old actress playing a 14-year-old. The mental and emotional journey Lore mast take – from swallowing her pride to using her sex as a weapon – is perfectly limned by this young performer.

| Robert W. Butler