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The period drama "Labyrinth of Lies" focuses on postwar Germany's efforts to come to grips with the Holocaust — but, oddly, the fake drama gets more attention than the real one.
The movie starts in 1958 as a young Frankfurt prosecutor, Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling), takes up the complaint made by a journalist, Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski), that a former concentration-camp officer is teaching in a local school. Radmann does the bare minimum at first, but Gnielka goads him into digging deeper.
What he ends up investigating, at the urging of the district attorney, Herr Bauer (Gert Voss), leads to the investigation of hundreds of thousands of deaths in Auschwitz — a place many Germans tried to forget after the war's end.
Director Giulio Ricciarelli, who shares writing credit with Elisabeth Bartel and Amelie Syberberg, dutifully depicts the overwhelming weight of evidence, the sheer number of victims and the breadth of German complicity in the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime.
But the story gets bogged down in melodrama, involving the fictional Radmann's love affair with a beautiful fashion designer (Friederike Becht), that acts as a distraction from the real-life legal drama playing out.
'Labyrinth of Lies'
Opens Friday, Nov. 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated R for a scene of sexuality; in German with subtitles; 124 minutes.