Never Look Away: Film Review

Never Look Away: Film Review

Cast: Tom Schilling, Paula Beer, Sebastian Koch
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Clocking in at over three hours, von Donnersmarck's epic, yet intimate, and sprawling piece about a young boy growing up in the Nazi period and subsequent life, isn't quite as gripping as you'd hope.

Schilling is Kurt Barnert, who from an impressionable young age is instilled with a love of art, thanks to his aunt Elisabeth. But when she's deemed unstable, she's taken away and wiped out as the Nazi regime begins to rise, and the quest to purify the blood line takes hold. 

Years later, Kurt finds himself lost for a voice as an artist, and meeting up with Ellie Seeband, the two fall in love. But Professor Seeband is unhappy at the tryst and moves to temper their union for reasons too spoilery to mention

Never Look Away is frankly, in parts grim and harrowing.

The early scenes where Elisabeth falls apart, and discovers what the doctors have in mind for her are utterly horrific, steeped in tragedy and the gnawing sickening realisation of what the regime exacted. In many ways, von Donnersmarck doesn't shy away from the ghastly legacy and delivers an appalling piece of film-making early on that's the worst kind of gut punch you could witness. It helps matters greatly that Koch is chilling and cold, a walking nightmare of a man under a pristine suit and perfect hair, who uses his knowledge to pursue his own agenda.

The film's first 90 minutes fly by, but as the second half kicks in and Schilling's Barnert heads to art college, the film begins to sag and bloat a little. The intertwined edges mingle and come to a head in a surprisingly different way to what you may feel you're owed after three hours of sitting and being haunted.

But what Never Look Away (with its clever duality of title in terms of what's happened in Germany's past, and what to do in the face of it) does is present an epic story in a different way. Whether it's a film about art and inspiration, a film about persecution and freedoms of speech or a film about never forgetting isn't fully clear; it embraces and blurs all these ideologies into one.

One thing's for certain though, Never Look Away is a compelling and haunting viewing experience from beginning to end.