THE STORY – In a German village near war’s end, women struggle to maintain normalcy as corpses appear along the river. When ordered to leave no Germans alive for arriving Russians, villagers face brutal choices about survival and humanity.
THE CAST – Jella Haase, Frida-Lovisa Hamann, Clemens Schick & Lukas Miko
THE TEAM – Tony Vahl (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
There’s a particular kind of war film we’ve seen many times: the one that ends in liberation, in relief, in a town finally allowed to exhale. “Krux,” which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, refuses that norm entirely. Tony Vahl’s feature debut is set in a small northeastern German village in the final days of WWII, and it looks at the end of the war from the side that has nothing to celebrate.
Most of the men have gone to the front. What’s left are a handful of women, children, and a few men – a mayor, a priest, a teacher – who were kept behind. Life still follows its old rituals: school, church, weddings, work. Greta (Jella Haase), our lead, is woken at night by a package at her door: a heart sent with the words “I promised him.” Hans, the German soldier she loves, has died on the battlefield, yet she marries him posthumously, posing on her wedding day in a white dress beside his soldier’s helmet. This image of grief introduces the film’s central tension: the clash between ordinary village life and the catastrophe closing in. The film returns to this repeatedly. Women wash piles of bloody clothes, blood soaking their hands and the water. Kids go to school. War planes drop leaflets. Beneath it all is a village whose only real information comes from propaganda on a fuzzy German radio signal.
Piotr Sobociński Jr.’s cinematography captures the blues and grays of a misty morning and holds onto them. This muted, overcast palette becomes the film’s visual argument for isolation. Lorenz Dangel’s score does similar work sonically, turning even an approaching storm into a metaphor for what’s coming. Together, score and camera build discomfort in the quiet surrounding the town – a dread that never breaks. A recurring visual device shows the town rendered in miniature, with a snake slowly encircling it. Though a little on the nose, it effectively tracks the enemy’s encroachment without showing them.
“Krux” becomes distressing in its portrait of propaganda’s grip on ordinary people. A soldier stumbles into the village near death, asking, “Do you know what we did? What they turned us into?” This crack of truth breaks the silence. But the town does not absorb it. The truth is there, yet it changes nothing because they have already decided what to believe. When the mayor’s (Lukas Miko) paranoia turns into policy – kill the livestock, leave the enemy nothing to eat or drink, and worse, ensure no living German remains for the Soviets to find – it is not based on what the soldier revealed. It is based on the version of the enemy the town has been fed for years.
It’s disturbing to watch a town talk itself into mass suicide after being fed so many lies about the enemy that death seems safer. The film wisely gives this idea a dissenting voice in Meta (Steffi Kühnert), a villager who seems like a healer, tending the dead and insisting that “fear creates the monster,” and that death comes on its own schedule, not by anyone’s order. The priest (Martin Wuttke) also calls the mayor a coward for peddling his own fear as gospel. Watching children rehearse tying a noose is as dark as the film gets. This story is fundamentally about what fear does to people and how Nazi propaganda turned self-preservation into an order to die. The performances carry this well; there’s real paranoia in the way these characters discuss what they think is their impending doom, and there’s visible strain in how they try, and mostly fail, to reckon with what’s actually being asked of them.
Structurally, the film is quite slow. The dread builds well for a while, but “Krux” asks you to sit in its bleakness for long stretches without much forward motion. At some point, the atmosphere tips into tedium rather than sustained tension. The film states its thesis early and mostly restates it, rather than complicating it further. Still, this is a striking, unusual debut, precisely because of the story it chooses to tell: an unflinching look at ordinary German civilians — not troops, not generals — driven to the edge by the very regime that claimed to protect them. “Krux” doesn’t ask you to forgive them or condemn them. It asks you to watch what happens when a people are handed a lie sturdy enough to die for, and believe it right up until the end.
