The Creeps: Part III

PHOENIX (B+) - Go all the way or don't go noir.

Writer/director Christian Petzold and his star, Nina Hoss, team up again after a successful '80s period piece (based in East Germany), "Barbara," for this harrowing tale of a Holocaust survivor in the days immediately following the fall of the Third Reich. The film not only has the classic look and feel of that era's noir cinema, but it borrows the genre's most common device: the idiot plot.

Hoss plays Nelly Letz, who we first see horribly disfigured while her friend (cousin?) Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) drives her through an American checkpoint charlie and to Lene's home in Berlin (itself home to the desolate Phoenix cabaret). Nelly undergoes extensive plastic surgery that alters her looks.

In fact, when the bandages come off and she ventures out in public in search of her husband, he doesn't recognize her. Or at least we are supposed to believe that he doesn't know it's her. (Therein lies the main aspect of the idiot plot.) But Nelly looks enough like her old self to give lunky Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) a bright idea: a scheme in which this new lady portrays his wife and stages a valiant arrival by train, fresh from the camps. And then, he and "Nelly" will claim Nelly's fortune.

It's difficult to maintain credulity throughout this middle portion of the film, as Johnny dresses her like Nelly and schools her in Nellynalia. Nelly, meanwhile, delves into Lene's theory that Johnny was the one who gave Nelly up to the Nazis. (Lene, who's rather butch in her trousers, is either quite crushy on Nelly or fears for her well-being, or both.) Nelly plays along with Johnny and nearly trembles at the thought that Johnny truly loved her -- or may yet again.

Hoss is devastating as a wounded bird, traumatized by the horrors she has seen and endured. (Her face, with bags under her eyes, literally looks haunted.) Zehrfeld has the marshmallow stud visage of Brad Pitt and Brenden Fraser. (Friends, more attuned to classic cinema, saw Clark Gable.) Berlin, meanwhile, is in rubble -- a city destroyed by bombs and a people devastated by what has been unleashed in their name.

The story is both complicated and a bit corny. But Petzold knows his way around a narrative and provides subtle twists and turns as he ever so gradually churns this from a simmer to a slow boil. This could be an epic picture from the golden era, a poor sibling to "Casablanca," a rich homage to Hitchcock.

And the filmmaker has an ace up his sleeve the whole time -- a zinger of a final punchline that is both clever and unforgettable. (It seems like one of those instances in which a writer starts with a great ending and builds a story to lead up to it.) Petzold knows how to frame images and convey great emotion. Hoss is his muse (this is their eighth film together), and together they know how to break your heart.