Film review: Lore

Classic World War II films – your Great Escapes, your Bridge on the River Kwais, your (ahem) Escape to Victories – tend, understandably, to present the Allies’ point of view. They usually focus on the hostilities and on men. Lore, however, which follows the eponymous German girl (Saskia Rosendahl) in the aftermath of the conflict, is free of derring-do, rousing overtures and jaunty Nazi-baiting. Lore’s fight is not against the enemy, but against hunger, the elements, arbitrary acts of violence and sexual abuse, as she struggles to lead her younger siblings to the safety of their grandmother’s distant home, following the disappearance of her high-ranking Nazi parents.

It does not make pleasant viewing. The family’s comfortable, bourgeois existence disintegrates dramatically, and before his departure, Lore’s father burns incriminating papers and dispatches the family pet. The discomfiting atmosphere lasts for the rest of the film.

Australian director Cate Shortland does not flinch from laying bare the brutality of war. There are no bombardments or battles, but Lore and her siblings are subject to the random threats and casual cruelty that emerge when law and order falls away, and the violence is the more shocking for the bucolic Bavarian background.

The children gain a protector in the form of Thomas (Kai Malina), a concentration camp survivor who travels with them on the long journey through the forests and fields to their grandmother. Love-hate is far too clichéd to describe the relationship between Thomas and Lore, though the Aryan Nazi girl is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the taciturn Jewish boy.

Lore is no hero. Despite her pitiable predicament and efforts to keep her siblings safe, it is hard to like her, as she clings to the anti-Semitic dogma inculcated in her by her parents, stubbornly denies the crimes of the Nazis even when presented with hard evidence and insults Thomas, who helps the family without abusing his power. Even the conclusion of the film brings no closure, marking not so much the end of a journey but the beginning of one: the German people’s journey to rebuild their shattered lives, psyches and beliefs. As such, Lore says much more about war than Steve McQueen jumping a fence on a Triumph motorcycle.