Lore

Taking place after Hitler’s suicide and while the Allied forces are closing in, this WWII drama almost asks the verboten: to have a little sympathy for the enemy. In this case, it’s the children of an SS officer and his complicit wife. After her parents are whisked away to prison, teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) must lead her four siblings, including an infant, through the Black Forest of Germany to a beacon of safety: their grandmother’s house. It sounds like a fairy tale, and indeed there are a fair share of obstacles and evils they encounter along the way. The biggest horror they face is learning what their beloved Führer, and more personally, their parents, where up to while they were living comfortably in the bucolic countryside. It’s a harrowing and sometimes grisly picture, and Cate Shoreland’s direction fits somewhere between Ken Loach’s gritty realism and Terrence Malick’s stunning, poetic imagery.