The World Will Tremble

The filmmakers have serious technical deficiencies, which is why it looks like the work of an amateur or a film school student for a credit

They can't even film a scene of people digging a hole, let alone burying the dead. And it is precisely the scenes of ditches full of corpses and their earlier gassing that should shock the viewer, but the viewer gets nothing of the sort.

Instead, they get an image of Germans behaving pretentiously and comically, pretending to be polite to the Jews who were brought there, making up stories that they were at the train station. The authors borrowed this from Treblinka, where the Germans created a fake train station. Meanwhile, in Chelmno, the camp was located in a small palace in the middle of the forest.

The Jews in the film look well-groomed and well-fed, they have their property and valuables with them. No, it didn't look like that. The Jews from the ghetto looked like walking corpses, in rags, half-dead, many died during transport. They could take 10-20 kg of basic things with them, not sacks and suitcases as we see in the film, and the filmmakers borrowed this from the stories of Treblinka and Majdanek.

For example, in the Lodz ghetto (from which they were sent to Kulmhof) 45 thousand people died of hunger, disease, and German brutality, 12 thousand in 1941 alone. The process of sending people to the camp was extremely brutal and people were killed on the spot if they resisted at all.

The filmmakers showed a scene in which the Germans and the camp commandant amuse themselves by making Jews dance and firing several hundred bullets into the air. The Nazis were animals, but that was exactly why they created gas chambers, so as not to waste bullets and to reduce the murder to industrial proportions, although there were individual examples of sadism. The Germans did not organize operetta performances, they murdered coldly, methodically in silence - I recommend the film The Zone of Interest (2023) if someone wants to see what it really looked like.

The Germans raped, but not officially, and a mass orgy with the participation of the commandant is certainly not possible, because Jews were subhuman to the Nazis and sexual contact with them was considered Rassenschande (racial disgrace) and severely punished.

How much the creators of the film had no idea about history is also evidenced by other small details. Kulmhof was located in the territories incorporated into the Reich, not in the occupied territories, so for going there in a Polish railway uniform you would get a bullet in the head when stopped. The Polish railway uniform is not a jacket with the Polish coat of arms on the shoulder, LOL, and on top of that with a post-war communist eagle without a crown. Nobody sent a chase after one or two escaped Jews, because it would be a waste of the Reich's resources.

In January 1942, the Third Reich occupied most of the European territory of the USSR, so rumors that they would be in Poland in the spring are impossible, especially since no one considered the Soviets an ally at that time.

Temperatures in the winter of 1942 in Poland reached -40 degrees Celsius and the ground was covered in a thick layer of snow. People in the countryside did not use agricultural tools from the 16th century (the creators probably borrowed them from some Bulgarian open-air museum).

Szlama Ber Winer and Michal Podlchlebnik did not escape together but on the same day, they met only in the ghetto in Grabów, which did not look like a ghost town, because it was a crowded village to which the Germans had taken all the local Jews.

I could go on and on about this poor film, I will only end by saying that this story is still waiting to be told by a professional filmmaker.

The true story of the attempt to bring the news of death camps to the world. We think of concentration camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek. We don't think of death camps because nobody was held there. Jews (mainly) arrived and were dead the same day - usually within a couple of hours. These were the true death factories and because they left little trace we know little about them. This unembellished but utterly compelling, absorbing and terrifying and much needed - film sheds light on an explored and horrific true story. Brilliantly directed and acted. Attended a q&a with the Director, Produce and Iactors: the level of research and effort to tell the story as it truly was highly impressive.

In a day when films about fictional comic book characters seem to garner more attention than riveting stories aimed at awakening our empathy, I am saddened by the number of harsh audience reviews for this bold piece of cinema.

In the face of increased normalization of hatred in our global community, may we never forget the horrors of our past. As a human race, we are far more vulnerable to repeating our crimes against humanity, if we avoid recognizing the subtle resurgence of those forces that drove such unspeakable acts.

This film, although hard to watch, is a CRITICAL reminder of how hatred can destroy any person, community, nation, and the world.

This movie is based on historically true events. It takes place during the beginning of 1942 in the (now famous) Polish death camp Chelmno. Whereby I always thought that the Chelmno "camp" was similar to a location like Sobibor - which was a camp with gas chambers that is located at the railway - this movie shows that the setup of Chelmno was actually very basic. It basically consisted out of nothing more than a large building.

Even though that you can clearly see that this movie is made with a low budget, it still has quite a number of things going for it. First of all, the actors are pretty decent. Most impressive are all the real looking uniforms, war vehicles (including even a gas van) and weapons. The cinematography is also pretty decent.

Where this movie however fails, is in the script. Especially during the first hour of the movie - before the escape takes place - the script fails to interest the viewer. It is just a sequence of known facts that took place in camps and its surroundings. Everything also seems to happen so slowly that you might even decide to stop watching the movie. The first hour just looks "artificial" and unreal. In my opinion, a better writer and better director would have greatly improved the end result. Because, like mentioned, they had quite decent actors and some great WW2 props available.

After about an hour into the movie, the most significant events of this movie take place: i.e. The escape. I think this part is pretty well done and certainly kept me interested until the movie ended.

Seeing this large difference between the very dull first hour and the more interesting part that comes after it (the escape), I honestly do not understand why this movie needs to have a duration of 1 hour and 49 minutes. The first hour can easily be edited down to around 30 minutes, thereby making it overall a way more interesting watch.

I also think that if they would have chosen a better writer and director, that the overall movie would have been a lot better.

I still decided to include this movie in my IMDb list of movies that are a recommended watch if you want to learn of the events that took place during WW2. I though think that this movie is amongst the lower ranks of this list that is currently one 260 movies (and mini-series) long... I included it because this is the first movie - that I know of - which shows you what kind of location Chelmno actually was. As mentioned, it completely changed my ideas on this location, because I originally thought that it was similar in setup as Sobibor. Clearly, this was not the case and therefore it triggered me to do a better investigation on e.g Wikipedia.

Considering all the above, I score this movie at 5.5/10, just barely resulting in a 6-star IMDb score.

I'm sat speechless in the dark, and will go to bed soon, but this movie will stay with me for days. A no-build up, no sugar-coating, start right up bleak unflinching account of some of the cruelest acts in human history. Oliver Jackson-Cohen was incredible, the pain in his eyes was evident in every frame, I swear I could barely move the whole film. I just don't know how the real subjects of the film managed. How you muster that strength. Directing and cinematography was stunning, Score was beautiful, I don't pretend to know how anything works but I hope awards season shines on this film. 10/10.