The Captain

Robert Schwentke, returning to Germany after a stint directing Hollywood franchises, made The Captain (2017) as a stark, black-and-white parable of how ordinary people become monsters. Based on the true story of Willi Herold, the so-called "Executioner of Emsland," it premiered at Toronto and San Sebastián to strong reviews.

Max Hubacher plays the nameless deserter whose chance discovery of an officer's uniform unleashes a horrifying transformation, as the authority of the costume licenses ever greater cruelty in the war's final, anarchic days. Schwentke shoots in cold, high-contrast monochrome and stages the escalating violence with a satirical edge that recalls the harshest war satire, refusing to grant his protagonist any redemptive interiority. The film is a study of how power and impunity corrupt, delivered without comfort.

Critics admired its formal control and its bleak relevance, though its unflinching brutality and a provocative closing sequence divided some viewers. By dramatising a real case, Schwentke gives abstract questions about complicity and the banality of evil a concrete, chilling form. Severe, blackly comic and genuinely disturbing, The Captain is one of the most uncompromising German films about the Nazi era, and a pointed meditation on the seductions of unchecked authority. Hubacher's blank, frightening turn anchors a film that places it alongside The Wave and The Experiment in a German cinema obsessed with how ordinary people submit to, and abuse, illegitimate power.