Who's In It: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs
The Basics: In the years leading up to the Holocaust, a German intellectual writes about euthanasia (partly because he wants to feel okay about wanting to have his dementia-ridden mom put down) and is then courted by the Nazis as a producer of extermination propaganda. Guess what happens to this passive guy? That's right, he learns that the Nazis were--spoiler!--really mean and bad after all.
What's The Deal: In honor of this being, I believe, the 17th Holocaust/Nazi movie I've seen this month, I have a good idea. Let's just stop making fictional films about it. There are already more heart-stopping documentaries out there on the subject than anyone could ever watch, and those are full of, you know, real stuff. There are even ones about German acquiescence, so that base is covered, too. So until the day comes that a tasteful, earnest, restrained drama about abject horror (like this one) actually conveys some abject horror, we don't need them.
Saved (Almost) By: Viggo Mortensen, who appears to realize that he's playing a willfully delusional shell of a man with no fixed moral center and, instead of doling out blank Keanu-Stares, manages to communicate his passivity and his conflict well enough to keep you following him along, even as he repeatedly betrays his so-called best friend, a Jewish man played by Jason Isaacs.
Weirdness That Doesn't Work: A strange hallucinatory affectation where people in the background are lip-syncing to Mahler's music, a symbol of the political consciousness that tries to push its way into his life and doesn't really move him until the movie's crazy final scene where the figurative becomes literal.