Sobibor (2018) Reviews

• A haunting depiction, worthy of its Oscar nomination

  Tin Man-52018-09-13

  Holocaust films are easily made exploitive, because, in the words of the late and great Roger Ebert,, "we do not need movies to convince us of the evil of ... the Holocaust," but rather, it is a subject better served in "films ... about the ways good men try to work realistically within an evil system to spare a few of its victims." To merely recount the violence that human beings are capable of perpetuating against each other makes for transgressive reflection rather than a useful one, because it denies us hope. Sobibor passes Ebert's test: From the first scene to the last, the horrors of the Holocaust are contrasted against the humanity of its victims and the courage that they ultimately find to rise up and fight back. It helps that the Sobibor camp is more cinematically satisfying, as it represents one of the only successful uprisings in concentration camps - 400 prisoners successfully escaped, led by Russian soldier Alexander Pechersky, and the third act breakout generates genuine tension as the heroes slowly begin to implement a plan that begins with individual acts of violence and ends with a convincing revolution. It is one of the great prison-breaks in the movies, made all the more jaw-dropping when the closing scroll reminds us that it is all true. In contract, Inglorious Basterds (a great film) had to create a fantasy ending that was as emotionally satisfying as the history featured in Sobibor. The scenes leading up to the escape depict the daily lives of both soldiers and prisoners within the camp, in both its banalities and horrors, and there are some truly gory and disturbing moments here, but they never feel unnecessary because of the way that lead actor/director Konstaintin Khabenskiy depicts these events through the eyes of the prisoners who, slowly but surely, refuse to be victims any longer. Khabenskiy makes for a dogged and convincing hero, but it is Christopher Lambert's depiction of Karl Frenzel, the Nazi administrator of the camp, that really elevates the film's tension-Lambert plays the part as a man barely holding onto his sanity, having internalized the suffering that he constantly orders and witnesses. It is the most chilling portrait of an unhinged Nazi official since Ralpph Fiennes in Schindler's List. Less successful is Khabenskiy's decision to suggest a romantic connection between Pechersky and a female prisoner that he knew before the war, mainly because I struggled to believe an opportunity for such a romance convincing in this setting; nevertheless, this relationship is well-acted and leads to one of the best character exchanges in the film. Sobibor is the Russian submission for the 91st Academy Award for best foreign language film. The film was shot in Lithuania, in six languages: Russian, Polish, German, Dutch, Yiddish, and English. This helps give the film the epic scope of a truly international production, and that is exactly what it feels like. This is one of the best films centered on the theme of the Holocaust that I have ever seen-well-acted, handsomely stages, filled with sobering imagery, and ultimately, a satisfying resolution that makes an often difficult journey worth taking. What begins as a tragedy ends as a victory; the film's success, and whether or not we accept the set-up of the first two acts, hinges on the execution of the escape. Khabenskiy absolutely delivers. I would be very happy to see this film appear on the list of nominees.

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• Go watch it, don't read moronic reviews

  mfaermark2018-10-16

  It's a great film. Don't listen to the the dumb and dumber reviewers who call the film 'boring'. Yeah sure it's boring if you have an attention span of a disorientated bat and IQ of a garden gate. Go back to your PlayStation 4, films are not for you in this case as is review writEye roll.

• Boring movie

  crazyrussians2018-06-02

  Great history story, Khabensky is amazing actor and i usually like Russian movies/tv shows about war; however, this one was super boring. I stopped at 40th minute because i could not watch any more. There is no story line, it seems to me that someone just took facts from "wikipedia" or history books and filmed them... No connections between slides, no background information behind actors, so you do not fall in love with any characters...It's straight up people in German clothes killing prisoners, who are supposedly Jewish. I expected more.

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• Uninspired and incredibly boring

  SimonDeKater2018-09-25

  Let's start it off with some good things: Konstantin Khabenskiy was great, like finding a pearl in a pile of horseshit. If only he directed as well as he acted. When I asked my girlfriend to name a single aspect of the movie that she considered "acceptable" apart from him she was silent for 10 seconds before saying "The lighting was alright". Now that we got that out of the way: apart from Khabenskiy the acting was absolutely horrendous. This wasn't helped at all by the fact that everyone was dubbed over for some reason in an extremely obvious and unsynchronised manner, which evoked frequent laughter in the movie theater. Some scenes were stretched out painfully long like I've never seen before. For a movie that has such emotionally strong source material and such direct graphic and raw material it was incredibly incredibly boring. I was just bored out of my mind the entire film. People were leaving the movie theater all movie long. Even people that amazingly held on for 1 hour and 30 minutes or more realized that they wouldn't get their lost time back by suffering another minute more and left before the ending. The uninspired writing and dialogue was just insufferable and combined with the acting made it impossible to get into the movie at all. Throw in a lack of character depth, development or any proper introduction or storyline and you simply only care about the raw suffering of the holocaust you're witnessing, but not about any of the actual characters or the story they're trying to convey. This story, by the way, was spread out wafer thin in the movie despite it being intriguing in real life and it was mostly padded with long dragged out scenes of intense suffering of irrelevant characters that you do not care about with no other purpose than to show the actual suffering itself. Oh, did I mention the uninspired and again plain boring soundtrack that sounds like they took the exact same orchestra from the Band of Brothers soundtrack and asked it to play completely random notes very slowly? Surely some piano tunes and slow dragging strings must automatically mean beautiful and emotional music right? If there's anything this movie did right it was giving you the feeling as if you were being held captive and tortured yourself. Really captivating in that sense.

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• Dubbing made this film almost bearable

  gerbenrebel2018-09-25

  In my country they've dubbed al the nazis with uneven german and dutch accents which made this mess of a film quite campy. As boring as the movie itself was, every word a german uttered was met with laughter during my screening because it sounded so foolish and stereotypical. I recommend seeing the movie Escape from Sobibor which is way better.

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