Blood & Gold

Germany, April 1945. A deserter is rescued by villagers and hidden on a farm. An SS unit is stationed in the same village, its commander hunting for the gold of a Jewish family said to be hidden in the area. The villagers are looking for it too. The war is nearly over and everyone is settling a last account. The subject is not the war but everyone being victim and looter at once. There are very few people here who could be called innocent; the villagers and the SS want the same thing and the difference is only in method. The form is a genre film: siege, explosion, bloody firefight. The violence is exaggerated and deliberately grotesque; the production is built as an action picture, not a history lesson. It is Peter Thorwarth's work, the director previously known for a vampire film set on an aircraft, and here too he uses a historical period as genre material. That approach drew criticism: the Nazi era becomes an action backdrop and the film does not examine what that means. Robert Maaser plays the soldier, Marie Hacke the woman on the farm and Alexander Scheer the commander. It was released on Netflix. Who it is for: viewers who like hard war action and genre cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the period to be treated seriously; the film does not do that and does not try to.