Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Phoenix Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Svet Atanasov September 11, 2015

Winner of FIPRESCI Prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, German director Christian Petzold's film "Phoenix" (2014) arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of British distributors Soda Pictures. The supplemental features on the disc include an original trailer for the film and making of featurette. In German, with optional English subtitles. Region-B "locked".

The familiar stranger

June, 1945. A young woman (Nina Hoss, Barbara, Yella) with a badly disfigured face is brought back to Berlin. She is so weak that she can barely stay on her feet. A doctor examines her and tells her that he can make her look beautiful again. He can’t reconstruct her old face, but she can choose a better one from his tiny catalog.

After the surgery it is revealed that the woman has spent time in a Nazi concentration camp and that before the war she was a singer. Somehow she survived. The majority of the people she met in the camp, however, were executed.

While she recovers, the woman repeatedly asks her best friend (Nina Kunzendorf, Woman in Gold) about her husband (Ronald Zehrfeld, Beloved Sisters). He was also arrested, but the Nazis did not send him to the camps. The woman never stopped thinking about him. He was always in her dreams and helped her survive. Eventually, her friend reveals to her that she has seen him, somewhere in the American sector.

The woman with the new face and her husband meet in Phoenix, a newly rebuilt cabaret where American soldiers like to spend their dollars. He does not recognize her, but she makes an impression on him and he offers to help her make enough money to escape Berlin and start a new life somewhere else. All she has to do is learn to impersonate his dead wife, Nelly, so that in a few months they can split her inheritance.

This film can be engrossing, but only if one does not overanalyze a few key elements of its plot. The most vulnerable one is the fact that the husband never once finds the easiness with which his wife plays herself suspicious. There are logical questions he could ask while they are practicing together that are intentionally ignored in order to have a series of events occur later on. Another is the legal status of their marriage, before and after the time the two apparently parted ways.

Depending on how one interprets some of the revelations after the woman returns to her home, one could also deconstruct the finale in a number of different ways. For example, theoretically the woman could have been betrayed by a couple of different people that knew her, but there is no question that the simplest read of the events preceding her arrest is also the most effective one. (It is undoubtedly the most thought-provoking one, which is why it should be the preferred one).

Phoenix is the fifth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and Hoss and it confirms that there is a special chemistry between them. In some of the most moving sequences from the film a simple look or gesture is captured by the camera in a way that reveals far more than words could. This is also done with such striking ease and calmness that viewing the film actually becomes quite the intimate experience.

Zehrfeld and Kunzendorf are convincing in their respective roles, but occasionally one could sense a whiff of artificiality in their actions.

The locations in Poland and Germany that were used to recreate the bombed-out Berlin are terrific. While cinematographer Hans Fromm’s camera moves amongst the debris, it literally feels like one is transported back in time.

Phoenix Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1, encoded with MPEG-4 AVC and granted a 1080p transfer, Christian Petzold's Phoenix arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of British distributors Soda Pictures.

The film looks fantastic in high-definition. The visuals are crisp and wonderfully detailed, making it exceptionally easy to see even tiny details. The daylight footage has outstanding depth, but even the darker footage from the cabaret can look quite impressive. The film has a well balanced color scheme with a variety of color tonalities that are wonderfully reproduced. Contrast levels also remain stable. Image stability is excellent. Finally, there are no encoding anomalies to report in our review. All in all, this is an excellent presentation of Phoenix that is guaranteed to please its fans as well as folks who are going to experience the film for the first time at home. (Note: This is a Region-B "locked" Blu-ray release. Therefore, you must have a native Region-B or Region-Free player in order to access its content).

Phoenix Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There are two standard audio tracks on this Blu-ray release: German DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and German Dolby Digital 2.0. Optional English subtitles are provided for the main feature. When turned on, they appear inside the image frame.

The film is complimented by a very interesting score that blends lush jazzy themes and some more straightforward classic themes. Both are balanced very well and effectively enhance the tense atmosphere. Dynamic movement is fairly modest, but separation and fidelity are outstanding. The dialog is always crisp, clean, stable, and very easy to follow. There are no audio dropouts or digital distortions to report in our review.

Phoenix Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer - original trailer for Phoenix. In German, with imposed English subtitles. (2 min).

• The Making of Phoenix - standard featurette with raw footage from the shooting of the film in Poland and Germany. Also included in it are clips from interviews with director Christian Petzold and actors Nina Kunzendorf (Lene), Nina Hoss (Nelly), and Ronald Zehrfeld (Johnny), production designer K. D. Gruber, etc. In German, with imposed English subtitles. (21 min).

Phoenix Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A young woman with a badly disfigured face returns to bombed-out Berlin hoping to reunite with her husband and makes a shocking discovery in German director Christian Petzold's new film, Phoenix. The plot of the film has a few questionable elements, but Nina Hoss' stunning performance makes them very easy to ignore. If you decide to see it and like it, I also recommend tracking down a copy of Petzold and Hoss' previous collaboration, Barbara, about a fearless doctor living in the defunct GDR. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.