The World Will Tremble

The World Will Tremble isn't here to comfort you. It doesn't offer catharsis or release. It traps you in the raw, unrelenting despair of its characters, and that's precisely the point. Some critics have knocked it for being emotionally oppressive. I'd argue it's immersive. You don't watch this film, you endure it, the way its characters endured the unimaginable.

Oliver Jackson-Cohen is phenomenal. His portrayal of a prisoner in the Chelmno extermination camp simmers with quiet despair. He doesn't need dramatic monologues. His performance is internal, bone-deep. You feel every ounce of exhaustion, fear, and spiritual collapse.

And then there's Michael Epp as the Nazi camp commander. At first glance, his performance might seem theatrical, too stylized, too cold. But it slowly reveals itself as terrifyingly calculated. He radiates a kind of casual, almost gleeful evil that feels otherworldly until you remember this was real. His blissful detachment becomes the perfect counterpoint to Jackson-Cohen's torment-matching bliss for despair, beat for beat.

Yes, the film is unrelentingly tense. Yes, it's emotionally exhausting. But when you're telling a story set in Chelmno, the first Nazi extermination camp-anything less would feel dishonest. The constant pressure is a narrative choice meant to evoke the psychological cage its characters can't escape.

Critics may call it overacted or overwrought. I call it a punch to the soul-and that's exactly what it should be. This film doesn't aim to entertain. It aims to haunt. And it does.

The unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust never cease to leave audiences aghast and speechless, particularly when it comes to wondering how something like this ever could have been allowed to happen in the supposedly "civilized" world of 20th Century Europe. However, those of us alive today often fail to consider that news didn't travel quite as fast or as widely in those days as it does currently. So, when it came to news about the Nazi death camps that claimed the lives of six million Jews in cold, calculated fashion, word of the carnage didn't make its way onto the world stage until after it had been unfolding for some time. And, were it not for courageous whistleblowing efforts of two escaped prisoners from the Germans' first extermination facility in Chelmo, Poland, it may have taken even longer for the accounts to surface. Writer-director Lior Geller's fact-based release tells the story of two runaway gravediggers, Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Newmark Jones), who fled the camp and made their way to the Jewish ghetto in Grabow, Poland, where they made contact with a rabi (Anton Lesser) who had connections to the Polish resistance movement. Solomon gave a full account of what was happening at Chelmo, the first reported testimony about Nazi atrocities against the Jewish community. This report was subsequently smuggled to London by members of the Jewish Underground, who presented it to the BBC for public broadcast in June 1942. And, at last, the world was aware of the butchery that was transpiring. From this, one would assume that this never-before-told story would make for a compelling film. However, when compared to other offerings about the Holocaust, this release, regrettably, comes up somewhat short. Perhaps the biggest issue here is the disproportionate emphasis that the narrative places on the already-well-known depraved and sadistic practices of the Nazis, events that account for nearly the entire opening half of the picture. As necessary as the depiction of these shocking and infuriating developments may be in setting the stage for what's to come, the amount of footage devoted to this part of the story tends to belabor the point. In fact, it's so prevalent that it nearly overshadows the heroic and more compelling account of the prisoners' harrowing escape, their tearful, gut-wrenching recounting about life and death at the so-called "work camp," and their exposure of the many lies that the Germans brazenly propounded about the nature of the facility. What's more, the picture could also use some shoring up in some of its technical areas, such as sound quality, lighting, editing, and a somewhat puzzling and uneven mixture of dialogue in German and English. To the film's credit, the fine performances of the three principals and its moving, emotive score help to make up for these shortcomings in a picture that gets progressively better the further one gets into it. And, to be sure, "The World Will Tremble" is by no means a bad film, but a number of other previous releases provide more effective accounts and treatments of this atrocity, such as "Sophie's Choice" (1982), "Schindler's List" (1993), "Remember" (2016), "The Zone of Interest" (2023) and "Lee" (2024), as well as the TV miniseries "Holocaust" (1978). Stories about this period in history are truly important and deserve commensurate treatment; it's nevertheless disappointing that this one didn't quite receive the handling it merits.

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.

The world will tremble is a very apt name for this movie. There appear to be some anti Jewish votes in the ratings but go by the actual reviews of people who have seen it. Your political persuasion should not detract from the horrors this story reveals. When news of these events first reached the outside world nobody would have heard of such things other than in history books of eras long past. The story moves at a deliberate slow pace. That helps the viewer slowly come to terms with what was witnessed. You need to feel the emotion build up inside to really appreciate what you are in fact witnessing. There are hundreds of holocaust movies. This may be just another to the passing viewer but it is real and gritty and brutal. Don't expect to feel good afterwards. If you have one decent bone in your body you won't.