‘Krux’ San Sebastian Review: The Terrifying Power of Fear

What the algorithm manufactures today was once produced by loneliness, isolation, and disinformation orchestrated by those in power. Younger generations may believe that living in parallel realities within the same time and place is a relatively new phenomenon, but it is actually a long-standing system, often fueled by fear of the other, of the unknown. A film like Krux, set in a German village at the end of World War II, may seem to have little to do with what is happening in the world today, but the parallels are astonishing. So is the monstrosity of what people are capable of doing.

This German-Polish co-production takes place in a remote German village in the final days before the Nazi surrender. Those who remain are women, children, and the few men who, for one reason or another, never went off to fight on the various fronts. Despite the information coming through the radio, it is clear that the end is approaching. The bodies of dead soldiers begin to arrive, the smell of blood seems to be everywhere, and, above all, a steady stream of radio reports has the villagers terrified about what might happen if Germany loses the war.

Fear of the barbarians —in this case, the Russians— is what hangs over the village and permeates the homes of its inhabitants. And Krux puts that fear front and center. This is a community of survivors who receive nothing but corpses, bad news, and warnings about a terrifying future. So what do you do? How do you live with something like that? How do you prepare people for the (supposed) horror that is coming?

Krux takes that premise and builds an atmosphere straight out of a horror story, with something of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon mixed with a war drama steeped in despair and dread. The men prepare everyone else for a grim fate, convincing them that the most patriotic thing to do is leave scorched earth behind, and that nothing could be worse than being captured by the barbarians who, they have been told, are coming to eat them alive. Greta (Jella Haase), the closest thing the film has to a protagonist, carries that question around in her head. She is hardly alone.

Tony Vahl’s film digs into the villagers and their experiences, setting those who want to follow the official order to leave scorched earth behind against those who suspect that perhaps this isn’t the most Christian course of action, including the village priest. Meanwhile, the children prepare for the coming catastrophe, playing survival games as if they were nothing more than games. As the river carries in corpses and strange things seem to be happening in the surrounding area, the conviction gradually takes hold that there may be no way out of this political and, ultimately, moral dead end.

With sumptuous, if somewhat overripe, cinematography by Piotr Sobociński Jr. and an elegant but occasionally overly solemn mise-en-scène from Vahl, Krux emerges as a harsh, bitter drama about the other side of the end of the war: the side of the defeated. An excellent first half-hour gradually establishes the major storylines and introduces its key characters, only for the film to become increasingly uneven, piling on somewhat heavy-handed metaphors (pretty much every insect here means something) and contrived situations designed to give the whole thing greater dramatic weight.

What works so well in the first half gradually begins to lose its grip, partly because of a series of opaque narrative choices that never quite make sense, as if something essential in the development of the characters and situations had been removed from this brief, barely 90-minute film. The subtle accumulation of details that initially brings this almost ghostly village to life—a place awaiting an apocalypse that may be more imagined than real—suddenly gives way to a more conventional form of elevated horror.

Visually spectacular, almost a showcase for the power of the stylized classicism associated with a certain strain of Eastern European auteur cinema from another era, Krux may not entirely deliver on the promise of its unsettling first half. But despite its formal excesses and its repeated allegories involving bees, snakes and cats, it ultimately prevails through the power of the story it has chosen to tell: that of a small village caught in the middle of a mysterious war, surrendering itself to fear and prejudice. Any resemblance to the present day is anything but coincidental.