Long after the last World War II veteran passes away – there are only hundreds left – we will still see countless films about that conflict. The stakes are easy to understand, serving as a metaphor for the struggle of good versus evil, which allow storytellers to explore ambiguity in whatever way they see fit. Sometimes that ambiguity can be breathtaking, like with Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, although there are other examples where clearly-defined stakes translate into outright laziness. Such is the case with Burial, a thriller set in the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s death. A tantalizing prologue gives way to a borderline insulting bait-and-switch, leading to a movie with half-baked ideas and a tedious execution.
Writer and director Ben Parker starts with a flash-forward in England, where an elderly woman (Harriet Walter) watches the fall of the Soviet Union. A neo-Nazi breaks into her home, but the woman has canny instincts, and she immediately incapacitates him, chaining him to the radiator. They talk. He wants to know about the woman’s past, since he previously served in the Soviet army. Parker then jumps to 1945, where Charlotte Vega plays her as a younger woman, with the Russian name Brana Vasilyeva. Her mission is both simple and symbolic: she needs to transport Hitler’s literal remains from Germany back to Russia. Berlin may have fallen, but that does not mean everyone has stopped fighting, so Brana’s mission is dangerous in ways she cannot anticipate.
The trailers and opening sections of Burial suggest the film might have supernatural elements. Brana’s comrades speak of werewolves, and there are flourishes suggesting Hitler might be a zombie or something (for reasons never made clear, they bury the casket carrying his remains every night). As the film continues, however, Parker reveals there is nothing supernatural about his film – despite borrowing heavily from horror tropes. It morphs into a standard invasion thriller, one where Brana, her comrades, and a handful of Polish farmers fight off Germans who want Hitler (or what’s left of him, anyway) for themselves. The Nazi motivations are obscure, even during a bizarre scene where the Germans film his body as a last-ditch propaganda tool. Compounding that frustration is Parker’s directorial style, which is clumsy and lacking clear spatial coherence, so all the intrigue of the flash-forward devolves into a shootout with a foregone conclusion.
What is so important about who controls Hitler’s remains? The Allies achieved victory in Europe, easily dismantling the German war machine along the way because Hitler – along with the rest of Nazi high command – took the easy way out. If Parker knows the answer to his question, he teases with it, up to and including an ambiguous final shot that leaves more questions than answers. There is nothing inherently wrong with revisionist history. Inglourious Basterds depicts a Jewish soldier literally shooting the flesh off Hitler’s face with a machine gun, an admittedly unsubtle image that nonetheless has a specific, provocative point of view. Burial has none of that bracing clarity, and instead devolves into a half an idea in search of a coherent story.
Photo courtesy of IFC Midnight
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