Lore Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Lore Blu-ray Movie Review

If war is hell, what is post-war?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 25, 2013

Humans as a species seem to like things properly demarcated, stuffed into easily understandable discrete units that have solid borders and well defined parameters. Thus, we tend to think about an epochal event like World War II just “ending” with something like V-E or V-J day in 1945. All done, pick up the pieces, move on. Of course, the reality of a situation like this is far from organized, and the chaos of the immediate post-War era is caught in all its hallucinatory splendor (yes, splendor) in the arresting 2012 international production Lore, based on a novel which was short listed for the Booker Prize a few years ago. Lore details the harrowing journey of five young German kids whose parents have abandoned them (more about that in a moment). Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) is the eldest of the children, though she herself is only in her teens. Suddenly Lore is the default mother ushering a brood of very young children (including an infant) through a nightmare trek as she attempts to get everyone to her Grandmother’s house and, hopefully, safety. Lore is meditation on many things: the odd German sensibility which first adulated Hitler and anti-Semitism and then denied that anything untoward had ever happened; the idiocy of prejudice, especially prejudice instilled on those too young to really understand its implications; and the vagaries of human nature in desperate circumstances, where some people will rise to the occasion while other will run from it, resolutely refusing to show even an inkling of human kindness. The film is intentionally disjointed, lurching from anecdote to anecdote and leaving the audience at times as discombobulated as Lore and her siblings are. Almost bizarrely pastoral at times (interrupted by some really gruesome reminders that we are not in fact in a sylvan wonderland), Lore is an impressive achievement by Australian Cate Shortland (Somersault), who co-wrote and directed the film. With an almost microscopic view of interrelationships in her sights, Shortland weaves a hypnotic and often disturbing tale of people thrust together under the most horrible of conditions, and then simply steps back to let those interrelationships unfold in some unsettling ways.

The desperation of the closing days of World War II’s European theater is brought to bear early on in Lore, as we’re quickly introduced to the teenager’s family. Her father (Hans-Jochen Wagner), evidently just back from the front, and mother (Ursina Lardi) are having an argument while Lore takes a luxurious bath. Lore wanders downstairs dripping wet to see a man she probably hasn’t seen for years. They have a quick reunion, but there isn’t time to celebrate: the father has obviously arrived to get his family to another, putatively safer, location. Why? Lore is a bit discursive in this regard, though it’s obvious the man is some sort of Nazi officer and of course the days for any Nazi are now obviously numbered. But a quick shot of Lore’s mother pulling huge binders off of a shelf in preparation for a bonfire at least hints of another reason: the family may have been involved in Germany’s well publicized Eugenics movement, the forced killing of any “undesirable” (separate and apart from the concentration camps) who might have infirmities of body or mind. (This is hinted at again later in the film when Lore stares at a clubfooted child in a barn.)

Lore has a younger sister named Liesel (Nele Trebs), two younger (twin) brothers named Günther (André Frid) and Jürgen (Mika Seidel), as well as an infant brother named Peter (Nick Holaschke). Once the family is spirited away to a mountaintop hideaway, things seem calm, at least for a moment, but there is some roiling dysfunction between Lore’s mother and father quite apparent, and soon neither parent is around to shelter or shepherd the children. The kids manage to hang on for a while in their little farm until a misstep by one of them leads to them being shunned by the other inhabitants, one of whom insists that the children must vacate their home. Lore, acting on hysterical instructions from her now deparated mother, decides to try to get her siblings to her grandmother’s house in Hamburg, more than 500 miles away, and the five young kids set out on their expedition through decidedly treacherous territory.

The second act of the film details the children attempting to forage food and shelter while at the same time slowly making their way toward their goal. Things get decidedly weirder when Lore catches the eye of a young Jewish man named Thomas (Kai Malina) while the family is briefly at a school shelter. Thomas begins following them, and while Lore is frightened (and downright dismissive once she notices the yellow Star of David in Thomas’ papers), she also recognizes Thomas provides them with a greater sense of security, especially when those very papers get them rides with American forces and, later, quite a bit of food (something helped by the fact that they have the infant Peter with them as well). There’s also an undeniable attraction between Thomas and Lore, and in one of the film’s most shocking scenes, Lore reenacts a sexual encounter she had witnessed between her parents in the mountain farmhouse.

Lore is an intentionally disjunctive experience. Shortland edits the film in a quasi-chaotic manner that often leaves the viewer uncertain of where they are or what exactly is going on. Even supposedly sequential moments are cut strangely—one early scene has Lore’s mother staring disconsolately in a mirror, which is edited to show different reactions. The film therefore has a dreamlike quality at times, especially with regard to the often stunning physical locations in which the children find themselves, dreams which just as suddenly turn to nightmares when the children stumble upon corpses left like detritus in buildings or on the road. (A quick aside here—the little baby playing Peter in this film spends most of his screentime obviously crying his eyes out. I have to wonder if this poor child is going to need therapy when he grows up.)

There is one rather interesting denouement toward the end of the film with regard to Thomas which may strike some as unnecessary and overly manipulative. The final moments of the film are also fascinating. Without spoiling the ending, what would seem to be a happy ending is shaded by Lore’s growing realization that everything she has learned, thought and felt about Germany is shattered. What she will choose to build out of those shards is left to the audience to surmise.

Lore Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Lore is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Music Box Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This is a really interesting looking feature due to its Super 16 source elements. Smaller millimeter formats often get pilloried for not offering the clarity and precision of larger formats, but Lore looks rather beautifully crisp throughout the vast bulk of its running time. While the image may in fact not have the pristine clarity of either larger format sources or digitally shot materially, what's here pops quite well, with nicely saturated color (some of which I suspect was color graded at the DI stage, especially since so much of the film is bathed in cool blue tones). Shortland emphasizes close-ups throughout the film, and those help boost fine object detail to excellent levels. There are some slight contrast issues here, notably in some of the darker scenes, but overall this is a really nice looking high definition presentation that proves that smaller millimeter formats don't necessarily have to look shoddy.

Lore Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Lore features both a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 as well as DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix. Surround activity here is relatively restrained, limited to ambient environmental effects as well as Max Richter's minimalist score, which tends to feature solo piano quite a bit of the time (as I mentioned in another recent review, if you're a fan of Vivaldi, you should check out Richter's inventive reimagining of The Four Seasons). Fidelity is excellent, with dialogue presented very cleanly. The 5.1 mix has one or two brief bursts of low end activity that may startle some listeners.

Lore Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Lore (1080p; 16:44) offers the requisite behind the scenes footage and interviews. This was sourced from disparate elements and there's a disclaimer about varying video and audio quality. Shortland has some interesting insights into what being a so-called "child of a perpetrator" is like, since she lives in South Africa and has African children.


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 5:49)


• Alternate Ending (1080p; 2:23) was an unscripted sequence that Shortland discarded for being "too romantic".


• Memories of a German Girl (1080p; 10:09) is an absolutely fascinating piece featuring the reminiscences of one Angela Greiner, a now elderly woman who was a young German girl during the War years. She recounts some of her history but also gives her thoughts on Lore.


• Panel Discussion (1080p; 14:27) features Reel Talk host Stephen Farber, along with Fareed Majai, director of the Goethe- Intitut of Los Angeles and Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, in a 2013 discussion with some audience input.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:15)

Lore Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Lore is an incredibly visceral experience, though that impact is often like stumbling through a nightmare from which it's impossible to awaken. Highlighted by incredible performances by a very young cast, as well as Shortland's emphasis on both the physical beauty and shocking violence of the children's surrounding, Lore may ask more questions than it ultimately answers, but it's an unforgettable experience. This Blu-ray offers excellent audio and video and the supplementary features, while relatively brief, are excellent as well. Highly recommended.