The stories commence the catharsis and healing process, not only for the victims but also for Germany.Īs a part of the healing, Labyrinth of Lies enshrines and celebrates the brave truth the film offers an emotionally affecting and illuminating piece - beautiful as well as edifying. Johan is plagued by the question, but he believes in justice and comes to believe deeply in the notion of testimony. They don’t suggest killers, making the tragedy all the more difficult to understand.Ĭan justice be found in a nation where almost anyone might be guilty? In a spine-tingling sequence that pays homage to the Costa-Gavras political thriller Z, Johan reads the detailed, horrifying charges to the grayed, aging former SS guards who have been arrested. Labyrinth of Lies is concerned with both the banality of evil and the pervasiveness of corrupt systems that penetrate seemingly civilized societies. “Don’t you realize?” the witness representative says. He doesn’t quite comprehend what he is hearing. When he is told that “hundreds of thousands” died in Auschwitz, he picks up a pen and asks for the names of the victims. He is both naive and dedicated in his quest. Johan - all rules and efficiency, as straight as an arrow - follows the law faithfully but is ruled equally by compassion.īrash and unrestrained, he has garnered the nickname “Cowboy” for his “Shoot first ask questions later” approach to tracking the guilty parties.

Yet all represents a charming, placid facade veiling the hatred and violence of decades earlier. The film provides gorgeous lines, sumptuous midcentury architecture and soothing green and blue walls offsetting classic suits.

The late-1950s Germany that Johan inhabits is tranquil and idyllic. Johan Radmann (Alexander Fehling), a dogged and idealistic young prosecutor in Frankfurt, follows a tip about a schoolteacher and former SS guard, taking him down a rabbit hole to discover the truth about Auschwitz. For a generation that grew up on Holocaust films and literature to realize that the world at one time didn’t know what the Nazis secretly did to millions of Jews and other groups seems almost impossible.Ĭhosen as the German submission for best foreign-language film at the next Academy Awards, the legal drama Labyrinth of Lies seeks to explore the silence surrounding the genocide by telling the remarkable true story of the German prosecutors who pursued justice for the crimes committed at Auschwitz almost 20 years later.

Labyrinth of lies movie review imdb