Lore (2012) User Reviews

Gripping tale of the human urge to survive

[rubenm · 8/10 · 17 March 2013]

You'd think that, 68 years after the end of the second World War, every perspective would have been covered by the numerous films that have been made about it. But 'Lore' proves that it's still possible to make a movie about an unknown aspect of the war.

In this case, it's the situation in Germany just after the victory of the allied forces. It's a very interesting perspective, because things get turned around. The Nazis are no longer powerful rulers, but hapless losers, afraid to get caught by the Americans. And the Jews, although still despised by most Germans, are the ones who get things done with the allied troops.

The movie shows a country in an almost apocalyptic state, with dead people and destructed buildings everywhere. Citizens can't trust each other and are willing to do anything for some food or transportation. The powers are constantly shifting; an ally can suddenly turn into an enemy.

It's in this utterly destructed and disheartened country that a family without parents is finding its way, led by Lore, a girl of approximately 16 or 17 years old. Her parents, high-ranking Nazis's, have left her to hide from the Americans, and it's up to her to lead her younger sister and three little brothers (of which one is still a baby) to her grandmother in the north of the country. They have to beg for food and shelter, sometimes paying with the jewels her mother left behind.

Australian director Cate Shortland is very good in capturing the mood of desperation and defeat. She uses faded colours, almost like a Polaroid picture, and shows lots of close-ups. Not only of faces, but also of hands, feet, clothes and shoes. It accentuates the oppressive atmosphere in post-war Germany, and the terrible fate of the children. The story gets a twist when the children meet a young man, who for some reason is willing to help them. The relationship between Lore and the young man is ambiguous, for several reasons.

'Lore' is not easy to watch. There are several disturbing and gruesome scenes in the film. But it's a gripping tale of the human urge to survive in almost inhuman circumstances. And most of all, it reminds us of the utter horrors of war. This war, and any war.

the psychology of genocide

[rugg-1 · 8/10 · 7 July 2013]

Lore is neither a denial of the Holocaust nor a sop of sympathy to surviving Germans. Instead, this is a film that treats, often very subtly and wordlessly, the terrible ambiguities and uncertainties of a situation we have learned to understand as completely black and white and transparent. It also deals with deeply diseased family relationships as a source for genocidal thinking. One of the main points of the narrative is that the teenager Lore discovers that her father was a genocidal war criminal. The film handles this discovery wordlessly. But there is a very explicit set of gestures that explain precisely what she has seen: she first stands in a crowd of Germans forced by the Allies to confront photographs of mass murder in exchange for food (this is mentioned very briefly in an aside by an unknown character), then she notices her father in uniform in one of the photographs of mass murder; she touches the photograph, and the glue backing it adheres to her fingers. Later she tries to remove the traces of glue from her hand. She returns and removes the part of the picture where her father is standing. Because the film is wordless on this point, the viewer doesn't know whether this is because she wants to keep the photograph to remind herself of her father's role in the atrocities or to deny his guilt. But subsequently her younger brother exhibits a treasured image of their father in that same uniform and boasts that "Vati" (Daddy) is out fighting in Belarus (the site of many atrocities). Lore somehow acquires that photograph as well, and we see her put the two images of Vati in uniform together and bury them under mud and grass. That's how this film works, and by working this way, it manages to reveal the painfully mixed and contradictory motivations all real human beings have. It interests me that some viewers are not able to follow a narrative given in images.

It is the dynamic between Lore and her parents that I think is a key element to this film, and it has to do with how young people become genocidal, and what might make them break with their psychological training. There is an extraordinarily ugly relationship between the parents and between the parents and the children. It was part of the ideology of Nazi Germany to reward German women with medals for producing as many children as possible. In other words, it is entirely possible that a woman like Lore's mother (a fanatic lover of Hitler) would produce a brood of five solely in service of the Fuehrer. Her husband (whom she also seems to loathe for what she calls his cowardice in abandoning the family and the cause) is just a prosthetic husband. She deeply jealous of Lore for her beauty and her budding sexuality, and in the scenes we watch, she treats her children as inept servants. When Lore shuts her younger brother up in a cabinet and vilifies him in the cruelest terms possible for stealing food (when he is hungry), one understands that she is following the example of her own parents' authoritarian methods. Cruelty, a harsh authoritarian morality, and a lack of loving kindness were the daily bread of that household; this is reflected in Lore's behavior as "mother" to her siblings.

When the mother leaves the family, it is not for inexplicable reasons, as one reviewer implied. We see that the parents are both implicated in the crimes of the war, because they go to the length of destroying their library and documents. The parents are clearly thinking about Allied revenge (when the mother tells Lore that the Allies kill babies, and that's why the mother can't take her nursing infant with her, the viewer doesn't know whether or not she believes this herself). We know why the mother leaves, but not where she goes. She says she is turning herself in, but she may be fleeing to a safe house and taking up a new identity. The children would keep her from escaping her old identity, so they have to be jettisoned.

In the amazing scene toward the end of the film when the grandmother (also -- surprise -- a strict authoritarian parent) chastises Lore's surviving younger brother for eating without the proper table manners, Lore finally makes a break with her upbringing. She shows us that she recognizes the hypocrisy and lies of her parents' generation by intentionally eating "like an animal" in support of her brother, spilling milk on the table and lapping it from her hands. And then she breaks all the little kitschy statuettes, including the little deer.

And on the subject of the Jewish helper -- yes, his identity is ambiguous. But the fact that he is a camp survivor is made clear from his tattoo. That he has false papers is an important point; the regime was all about telling people who they were. When Lore understands that he is a Jew, she immediately tries to put him into the category "Jew" she has been taught: parasite, lecher. But he breaks out of those categories. He refuses to be the person she frames him to be. The fact that we as viewers are anxious to have his identity defined through "papers" puts us unhappily into the same position as the Nazis.

On the whole, this film could disappoint some viewers by not maintaining traditional story structure or temporal structure, by leaving significant things unsaid and unexplained, by avoiding some of the traditional scenes of war films (destroyed cities, fire-fights), by depicting American soldiers in a less than heroic or even congenial way. But if you are a film viewer with patience for non-mainstream filmmaking, this is a profound and beautiful (though sometimes brutal) look at disease.

A very complex film about Germany at the end of World War II

[steven-leibson · 7/10 · 10 February 2013]

I just saw this film at the Camera Cinema Club in San Jose. This is an immensely complicated film about the children of an SS officer and war criminal. The father disappears. The mother gives herself over to the Americans, and the children (aged 15 down to 7 months) are left to fend for themselves and make a 500km trip to their grandmother's in Hamburg. Germany is in ruins. People are starving and sick. They deny the Holocaust and mourn their dead leader who committed suicide in a bunker. Throughout it all, the 15-year-old lead character Lore must somehow get her siblings to grandma's house while slogging through the chaos of the failed Third Reich.

As I said, it's immensely complicated. It feels like a slice of life even if it is fiction. The cinematography is excellent. The lead actress, all of 19 in real life, is obviously very talented. I gave the film a 7 out of 10 because it's a bit too disjointed for my tastes, but perhaps that's an effective way to portray Germany's disarray at the end of the war.

Intriguing investigation of under-explored era

[bruce-moreorless · 7/10 · 25 September 2012]

Set in Germany at the end of the Second World War, this film takes up where others like Downfall leave off and asks questions about how the erstwhile beneficiaries of Nazi rule cope with their new world. The film tracks the journey of five innocents as their life of privilege collapses and they are forced to come to terms with the effects of dreadful events over which they had no control but to which they have given their tacit support.

Four of these children are really too young to bear any culpability. Only the oldest, Lore, is really capable of comprehension and it is through her eyes that the film is focused, as she slowly realises just how much her parents are implicated in the horrors of the Nazi regime, and, as an extension of this, herself and the whole German people. Lore is helped to this realisation by Thomas, a Jew who appears to have been liberated from a concentration camp. But Thomas also has a psychological burden and may not be all he appears.

This is another fine film from Cate Shortland, someone who surely should be making more films more often.

In response to the 1 out of 10 from an earlier reviewer...

[edula · 9/10 · 18 February 2013]

I've just finished watching 'Lore', and found it to be a deeply moving story, beautifully shot on film (which is becoming a rarity), with a breathtaking performance by the lead, Saskia Rosendahl.

I wasn't planning on coming on here to write a review, but after reading other people's views and comments, I was quite stunned to see one reviewer giving it only one star out of ten, claiming it to be 'Holocaust Denial: Trash!'. Having read this reviewers comments, it seemed to me that the reviewer had missed a crucial element in the film, and her reaction seems to concentrate on a revelation from the final third of the film which, if the earlier reveal isn't taken into account, could have caused her reaction.

The following comments contain a good few spoilers, so please don't read on if you have not already seen the film.

In the aforementioned reviewer's comments, she mentioned the scene where it is revealed that the papers carried by the character Thomas were not his own, but those of a Jewish man named Thomas Weil. It is mentioned by one of the children that Thomas had told him that was not Jewish, but carried the papers because "Americans like Jews". If basing the theme of the film on this scene alone, I can almost see why this reviewer came to her conclusions, as she appears to have assumed that Thomas was NOT Jewish all along.

However, earlier in the film, we see Thomas notice Lore looking at the numbers tattooed on his wrist, which he then covers with his sleeve. Thomas is a survivor in every way. He has survived the camps, and has adapted to continue his survival. Although it is never explicitly explained, using another persons papers may have been easier than not having any papers at all, and the revelation to the younger children may have been because Thomas knew the young boy would not follow him to safety if he had thought Thomas was Jewish.

For Lore, it is evident from the moment she sees the tattoo that she knows Thomas is Jewish. Even after the revelation that the documents are not his, she still knows. This explains her actions in the final few scenes, a reaction against her earlier beliefs and strict upbringing. This is what makes it all the more powerful.

The reviewer also references one other scene, of other passengers on a train discussing the photographs of holocaust victims, and one of these passengers claiming that they are faked circulated by the Americans. Is the inclusion of this scene intended as 'Holocaust Denial'? I think not. When Lore overhears this discussion, she is already fully aware that the photographs are real, and we know this because earlier in the film we see her tearing away a piece of a photo, which is later revealed to contain the image of her father in full uniform, witnessing the atrocities. At this point, she is unable to deny either the events or her fathers involvement.

The reviewer I have mentioned stated that she was hoping for a classic example of the 'Bildungsroman', or coming-of-age story, and personally I feel this is exactly what director Cate Shortland has given us. A tale of a young girl who has to come to terms with the end of adolescence, the end of a brutal war, and the gradual realisation that all she has been led to believe may not be true.

a bleak and foreboding coming of age drama set in Germany during the dying days of WWII

[gregking4 · 6/10 · 16 September 2012]

Eight years ago, Cate Shortland's debut feature cleaned up at the AFI awards, winning 13 awards, an amazing achievement, albeit it in an fairly average year for local films. Over the passage of time, views have changed and now people have probably been kinder to the film. After an absence of eight years, Shortland returns to the screen with her second feature, Lore, which is based on one episode in Rachel Seiffert's best selling novel The Dark Room. This is a bleak and foreboding coming of age drama set in Germany in the spring of 1945, during the dying days of WWII. Fifteen-year-old Hannelore (newcomer Saskia Rosendahl) watches as her father, an SS officer, prepares to abandon the family home. He burns valuable documents before he heads off to the front and certain death. When news reaches the family that Hitler has been killed, Hannelore's mother surrenders to the Americans, leaving the teenager in charge of the rest of the family. She is charged with helping her siblings – younger sister Liesel (Nele Trebs) and twins Jurgen (Miki Siedel) and Gunther (Andre Frid) and baby Peter – travel across a divided Germany to reach their grandmother's house in Hamburg, some 500kms away. They journey across an inhospitable environment and face hunger, exposure from the elements and even capture. Lore is resentful of her responsibilities, and is also fiercely anti-Semitic. Along the way they meet Thomas (Kia-Peter Malina, from The White Ribbon, etc), a Jewish refugee and survivor of a concentration camp. But she has to form an uneasy alliance with Thomas in order to survive their treacherous journey. Lore is forced to rethink her ideology and National Socialist beliefs in the face of the new reality for the defeated and occupied Germany. Lore is a dark coming-of-age tale about the loss of innocence, awakening sexuality, identity and family. Lore is forced to deal with the consequences of her actions and question her beliefs, and much of the film unfolds from her perspective, which lends a fresh insight to the traumatic experiences and the harsh world around her. Although it is dealing with familiar themes and universal issues, the setting gives the material a freshness and realism. Films like the recent Wunderkinder and The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas have also viewed the horrors of war from a naïve children's perspective, which makes events even more harrowing. Shortland eschews conventional narrative structure here, often working in short, sharp takes, and she uses imagery and sensations to create a gradual sense of dread. Shortland has a distinctive vision for the film, and this is a more assured and mature piece of filmmaking than the flawed Somersault. The dialogue is all delivered in German, with subtitles, a risky move. The central character is initially unsympathetic, but Rosendahl's performance is mature and assured, and she captures the complex emotional journey of the character well. It is not an easy film to warm too, but audiences soon become emotionally invested in her plight and her arduous journey. Shortland is aided by the lyrical cinematography from Adam Arkapaw (who has previously worked on films like Snowtown and Animal Kingdom, etc), which captures the bleak beauty of the setting. There is some breathtaking imagery, and the close-ups of flowers and thistles and the bleak beauty of nature creates a stark contrast with the ugliness and horror of war and the desolation of the ravaged countryside. A co-production between Australia and Germany, Lore is a harrowing and affecting drama. The film is Australia's official nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film for the 2013 Oscars.

Arresting, Great Filmmaking!

[samkan · 9/10 · 12 June 2013]

I've written close to two hundred IMDb film COMMENTS and this is the first dedicated to my distaste of other comments, herein those of rickcafe419 and kathleen-wedderburn. Both assigned LORE a single star, as they are certainly entitled to do. But read their respective entries. Rick struggles with a blind rage at Germans in general and Nazis in particular. To him, any treatment less than INGLORIOUS BARTARDS appears insufficient to fuel outrage. He is annoyed that LORE was "designed to engender sympathy" (where did this occur?) to unspecified Germans, apparently assigning children the capacity to independently come to conclusions about good and evil. Rather, LORE did a wonderful job of, inter alia, depicting human denial and hypocrisy. These traits outrage Kathleen so she decides to hate the film for arousing her emotions. Kathleen and Rick are as certain that all Germans (kids too) were in on the atrocities as terrorists today believe all Americans participate in warmongering, drone strikes, etc. Likewise they apparently lack the understanding that circumstances painted by an artist, filmmaker, etc., do not necessarily support that person's endorsement of the attitudes, actions, etc., of the characters involved. It upsets me there exist those who, while so vehemently challenging the right to an opinion, so blatantly suggest that their opinion is better informed. In such event I may be accused of being as guilty as rickcafe419 and kathleen-wedderburn for writing this comment. But I will only go so far to say that rickcafe419 and kathleen-wedderburn's comments are better than no ones.

Who to trust when you're at war

[deloudelouvain · 6/10 · 1 March 2017]

Lore isn't a bad movie. If it was not for the ending that I didn't really like I would have scored it a bit more. But the story, the filming and the actors were all good. It's a nice example that your kids will grew up like the parents learn them to behave. Just like dogs, you don't have mean dogs in the beginning, you have mean dogs because of their education. In this case Lore, the eldest of a whole bunch of kids, learns from her Nazi parents to hate Jews. And the rest of the story is the long journey across Germany after the defeat of the Nazis, where she has to rely on a Jew, the human being she's supposed to hate. It's a lesson for everybody, that the nationality, religion, or color of your skin don't matter. There's good and evil in any race or religion. Just don't assume everybody is bad because that makes you the bad one. Lore shows the cruel times people had to endure in wartime and even after the war. Not a bad movie at all.

Ethical challenges and compelling compassion

[commerce-458-102159 · 10/10 · 4 October 2012]

I won't add to the reviews already written, but I want to comment on how this film moved me personally. I saw this film at the Vancouver International Film Festival and rated it "Excellent" for its stunning visual accomplishments, superb acting, its continuous suspense and mystery, and for the moral challenges it presents through its storyline. This is a film that will stay with you a long time after you have left the theater, even if your parents did not live through this era in Europe (as mine did). The film touches on so many human elements -some very conflicting- ranging from hope, compelling compassion, and the draw of sexuality, to revenge, murder and hatred. It brilliantly blends the social and the individual with it's backdrop of the socio-historical landscape of Germany right at the end of World War Two and how the power of that situation impacts on the lives of its protagonists. If ever there was an artful illustration of how one generation is affected by the actions or inactions of a previous generation, Lore excels in demonstrating that.

Score and Saskia Rosendahl

[christian94 · 7/10 · 2 June 2016]

German composer Max Richter who also scored Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Shutter Island (2010) scores a beautiful and haunting musical landscape that matches the contemplative directing from Australian writer/director Cate Shortland. It never failed to captivate me at every scene and with every note. Similarly the sound is amazing in every detail and add layers to the sometimes sparse dialog.

Saskia Rosendahl is stellar as breakthrough difficult and subtle role to portray. The directing is very good and allows glimpses of human feelings, frailty, fear and frugality in the midst of madness.

A slow, steady and apt examination of difficult situations, death and horror, seen by an unprepared, misinformed youth. Aren't we all also unprepared and misinformed in many ways?

Slow steady emotionally dense, sad, and utterly gorgeous movie

[secondtake · 9/10 · 25 August 2013]

Lore (2012)

A gorgeous, depressing, rare film about a family of Germans who need to survive the chaos and poverty of the end of World War II. This is a really terrific movie even though it has a single, basic, ongoing, sad arc--moving from place to place in search of food and safety as the Allies, mostly unseen, take over administration of the country in 1945. What it manages to say is not just that war is bad, or that people have the ability to survive anything if they must, but that beliefs and politics are stubborn and irrational.

It's this last part that comes through it all as the shining purpose. It's one thing for this band of children to beg for food or walk though forests weary and assaulted by marauders. But to have them run into others who, like themselves, don't know where to turn or what is going on, and still have a devotion bordering on worship for the fuhrer is mind blowing. But believable.

The filming--scenes, light, color, moving camera, and the sheer range of all of these from scene to scene--is stunning, absolutely terrific. As you might grow weary of all the weariness, you never grow weary of the movie because it's so rich in other ways. And it's never dull, either, as characters come and go and their motivations turn on a dime. How it ends, both literally and emotionally, will stay a surprise, and yet when it happens it makes such perfect sad undramatic sense.

There are all kinds of war movies, and this is an important insight into one of the least explored aspects to it all--the terrible aftermath. It's an Australian production, mainly, shot in Germany in German. And it's a really special, thoughtful, beautiful film.

Slow but compelling

[rogerdarlington · 3 September 2013]

Surprisingly this 2012 German-language film was co-written and directed by the Australian Cate Shortland which explains how funding came from Australia plus Germany and other European sources, but it was shot entirely on location in Germany. The story unfolds slowly and not always clearly, so this is not a film that will appeal to everyone, but it is a powerful and thought-provoking work that deserves a wide audience.

The Hannelore of the title is a German girl in her early teens who, at the very end of the Second World War, finds herself abandoned by her Nazi parents and left with four younger siblings, one a baby, with instructions to take them to her grandmother's place, a long way across an utterly devastated land. In her first film role, Saskia Rosendahl is amazing as a young person who, on a frightening journey, has to endure not just considerable physical deprivations but profound challenges to perceptions of her parents, her country and those evil Jews.

Too small budget for good stuff

[woutervandersluis · 7/10 · 11 May 2013]

A good script with intriguing play of prejudice, genuine feelings and deceit against a tragic background. Lore is going beyond the regular holocaust movie not only because showing the German side but also playing with the expectations of the viewers. What is lacking though is a bigger budget for this historical movie. Too little extras mostly: Two US soldiers cannot represent a large army. More than a small railway station could not be rented as a building. There are no pictures of bombed cities. The nature shots are great but are eternal and don't give the right historical and geographical feel. Lore feels like a play to me lacking cinematographic historical scenery.

Extraordinary and very disappointing at the same time

[MovieLoverLondon · 4/10 · 20 September 2013]

What a terrible waste...

Saskia Rosendahl 10 out of 10; Cinematography by Adam Arkapaw 10 out of 10

They both will win Oscars one day, I bet! ;-)

BUT

"Story" 1 out of 10

Character development 1 out of 10

The film moves slowly (which I like) and is beautifully shot.

The love-hate relationship between the main characters could have made a great story but is completely wasted. Most of the time you are left wondering why (on earth) the character would behave like this in this particular situation.

The inner struggle and conflicting emotions of Lore regarding the Nazis and her parents role in the system are boiled down to three short scenes (without spoken words) and could have been a great story as well...

Bleak picture of immediate post-war Germany.

[TxMike · 30 August 2013]

World war 2 ended in 1945, both the Japanese and the Germans vanquished and subject to the victors. Last week I saw "Emperor" which relates to the immediate occupation of Japan and whether Emperor Hirohito should be tried for war crimes.

This movie, "Lore", is quite different. It is about a German family of 5 children forced to fend for themselves as their Nazi father and mother are taken to some sort of camp. Before the mother goes, voluntarily to avoid death, she gives the oldest whatever money she had, and a few other valuables, instructing her "If I am not back in 3 days travel to Hamburg and find your grandmother."

Young actress Saskia Rosendahl, about 18 during filming, is Hannelore, but just called "Lore". In an instant she has to grow up and become the head of the family, attending to her younger sister and three younger brothers, one still nursing. She has to find her way to grandmother's while avoiding capture or death in her country, different parts occupied by the Polish, the English, and the Americans.

It isn't an easy journey and not all survive. They meet a young man who first seems a threat but ends up helping them by claiming to be their brother. He had stolen the credentials of a dead Jew and used them for himself because he had heard Americans liked Jews.

This certainly is Lore's story, about how she dealt with the loss of her parents and loss of her country as she knew it. There is a telling scene at the very end that puts it all in perspective. Good movie, often hard to watch. German with English subtitles on Netflix streaming movies.

SPOILERS: Finally safe at grandmother's Lore is clearly still upset with everything she saw and experienced. Grandmother was acting as if everything had returned to normal, even fussing at the young boy for poor table manners. Lore went into the bedroom, one by one took each china figurine and smashed it with her shoe. It was her way to say "Everything is not normal, it never will be, and let us not pretend it is."

thought provoking personal journey

[SnoopyStyle · 7/10 · 20 September 2014]

As the Allies close in, Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) and her Nazi parents try to hide in the countryside. Her parents are fighting. Her new life is rustic. First her father abandons them. Then her mother leaves telling her that the Allies kill the children. Finally they are kicked out of the farm by the owner. She has to lead her four younger siblings to their grandmother in Hamburg. The world is a dangerous place filled with desperate people. They are helped out by Holocaust survivor Thomas but she is conflicted about the parasitic Jew.

This is a little thought provoking movie. It's a fascinating journey of a young woman trying to come to terms with the lies of her parents. It's not simplified. There are twists and turns. They are not out of line. The journey probably needs a few more dangerous moments to elevate the tension. For the most parts, it's a slow simmering tension. This is more about Lore's personal journey of her thinking about the war and her parents.

You have to be patient with this movie

[rickyvee · 9/10 · 15 April 2013]

It's a punchline movie.

The ending ties it up well and puts it in proper perspective. Human perspective.

The movie, for me, is largely symbolic, archetypical. Lore is not really a person she IS the immediate post-war Germany.

Everything that she experiences, all her opinions, all the opinions she is exposed to and indoctrinated with, are the points of view of millions of the German populace.

How she deals with it, or denies it is how Germany dealt with and denied it. The 'it' being the entire ethos that permitted/enabled WWII.

In a sense all cultures are a form of mass hysteria, mass hypnotism. Societies indoctrinate as part of their nature, actually part of their definition is the values with which they indoctrinate their populace.

If the values are extreme and violent, the populace often follows. It the society fails at its aims and is physically destroyed, then the population becomes valueless and must die or reinvent itself.

Post WWI German society didn't die, so this is a movie about the pressures, the pressure cooker, in which gave birth to its reinvention.

So, as a piece of symbolic representation, it's magnificent.

There are no plot holes, every bit of dialog, every image, in necessary for understanding.

And patience is required. The viewer assembles all the images, all of Lore's perceptions.

And the pressure cooker cooks.

This should have been better given the premise.

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 7 June 2014]

"Lor"e was the entry from Austria for the category of Best Foreign Language Film for the 85th Academy Awards in 2013, though it was not recognized as one of the final nominees. While there were some aspects of the film I liked, the overall package wasn't especially strong and perhaps this is why the film did not receive a nomination.

When the film begins in 1945, the Nazi government is toppling. This is impacting one particular family in the movie, the Dresslers. Apparently the parents were war criminals—though exactly what they did is never really discussed in the film. All you know is that the mother and father are gone and the oldest child, Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), has been told by her mother to get herself and her siblings to their grandmother's house near Hamburg. Considering that they have no money, they are in the far eastern portion of Germany (or perhaps in Poland) and want to travel hundreds of miles to the west as well as Lore appearing to be about 15, this is a very daunting task. Most of the film consists of the children scrounging for food and scheming to make their way to safety and shelter. Eventually, however, Lore becomes disillusioned and their reunion with Grandma isn't so happy after all and the film ends.

There is so much about this film that seems unanswered and vague. Who, exactly, the man was who teamed up with them and helped them is never really revealed—nor his fate. Similarly, why the parents (especially the mother) are war criminals isn't too clear. But, most importantly, exactly why Lore becomes disenchanted isn't really 100% clear. You assume that she has become skeptical about the Nazis and the rightness of the cause…but her actions in the end of the film could be attributed to many things—such as the repressive atmosphere at Grandma's. And, if she was disillusioned by the Nazis or horrified at their evil, what exactly caused this change in Lore? Could it simply be looking at the identity papers and photos from one supposedly dead Jew? And, apart from Lore growling at Grandma and stomping on some trinkets, how are she and the siblings going to deal with all this? All I know is that so much of the film is left to the interpretation of the viewer and had I not read a brief summary on IMDb, I would have felt lost.

The idea of a girl slowly coming to realize the evil of her country and parents IS intriguing—and in the documentary Hitler's Children you see interviews with surviving family members of many of the worst Nazi butchers of the war. However, with "Lore", the message seemed muted and not nearly as compelling. This, combined with the extensive use of the hand-held camera and a slow plot, made this film a bit of a letdown for me. While it's not a bad film, it sure could have been a lot more interesting.

If you do want to see the film, be advised that there is a decent amount of nudity and rather graphic depiction of suicides that are unsettling. I would have expected Lore and her siblings to perhaps see photos of dead Jews or concentration camp victims—but you don't. These folks were mostly Nazis who either killed themselves with gunshots to their head or were murdered brutally.

"Lore" was just released on DVD and is also available through Netflix.

Racism is taught, it does not come natural

[pefrss · 10/10 · 16 February 2014]

I missed this film when it came out and just found it in the local library on DVD. The most interesting and thought provoking films about the Nazi time seem to come out of German speaking countries fifty or sixty years after the fact and I was surprised to read that it was actually an Australian film and the director was Australian, but from the credits I learned that it was cooperation. You have to see this film several times to get it all and even then many scenes are open to interpretation as much is only shown in images without words.

This film shows how children get indoctrinated with the beliefs of their parents before the time they are able to form their own judgment. Racism is taught, it does not come natural. It also shows that an authoritarian education produces people who follow orders without questioning them. What is shown above all is that people are not willing to give up on a dream. Hitler created this dream of Germany being the greatest country on earth with the most powerful military and that there will be a final victory. When instead of the final victory the ultimate disaster happened ,they were just not willing to let the dream go.

The lead character Lore goes on a difficult journey from teenager to adult when she is suddenly forced to be the head of the family of five children struggling their way through the ruined Germany from South to North through the different zones now occupied by the US, Russia, Britain and France. The parents who obviously were high ranking Nazis took the easy way out and abandoned the children. Here in the States nobody since the Civil war experiences the aftermaths of a lost war. All wars are fought far away and only the relatives of the dead or wounded soldiers have to deal with the aftermaths of war while the general population does not have to bear the consequences of the decisions their leaders made. No bombed out cities, no hunger, no rapes by the enemy soldiers, no fear of being imprisoned, no guilt feelings and no questioning of their own or other's actions.

This film gives a very accurate picture of the postwar Germany and I am qualified to say so as in a way I was the little baby Peter in this film. I was born in January 1945 in Berlin and my parents had to flee to the Black Forest when the Russians invaded Berlin. I spent my first year of life on the road together with my seven year old brother and my parents ,who were starved to skeletons, selling all the family jewelry and silver for food along the way. There are no pictures of me as a baby and all I ever heard of my birth was that my mother was scared to death during the whole pregnancy because Berlin was bombed all the time. Like nearly all Germans of my generation I hate war. I do not know any young boy my age who entered military service, they all chose civil service instead when they were drafted. Of course I was too little to remember my first year, but I remember very well that nobody talked about the war when I grew up. Even the teachers in school managed somehow to omit this subject in history classes. I grew up in a society who did not practice racism. Only when I moved to the US did I learn what racism looks like. I also grew up with friends who came from large families and at the time I thought that my parents had only two children because they married later in life. Much later I realized that these families with five or six children were following Hitler's population program to produce as many children of the "Arian" race as possible. What was very interesting about this film was also that people did not like Americans, I do not remember that, I grew up as an European and America was so far away that it did not concern me. .

I am so glad that many people in this forum recognize what a powerful film this is. The only very small critique I have is that the people the children meet in the Black Forest would not speak High German, having grown up in this area it just felt so wrong, everybody speaks dialect. I thought the acting was outstanding , I was already familiar with the actor who played Thomas from the " The White Ribbon. " which is another excellent movie showing how Germans got to be the way they were during the time leading to WWII. My compliments to the director I will make sure I will see all her films in future.

Finding out who your parents really were can break your heart

[vsks · 7/10 · 24 April 2015]

The eponymous heroine of the movie Lore is 14-year-old Hannalore. Her parents have been staunch National Socialists, and at the end of the war both have disappeared, and the only sure thing about their fates is that they are not coming back. Lore, her younger sister, twin brothers, and baby brother are alone in a cabin in the Black Forest with no food. The neighbors know whose children they are and want them out. To find refuge, they must attempt to traverse the length of a ravaged Germany to their grandmother's home in the north. Without papers, crossing from the American to the Russian to the British Zone is chancy and requires night travel. And the Russians hate them on sight. Along their laborious way, they encounter many unspeakable results of war, but little food, and Lore gradually depletes the cache of her mother's jewelry for an egg or a little milk for the baby. Gradually, Lore sees the consequences of her parents' politics. In one town, she studies the photos posted of the death camps. Other people attempt to explain away how such pictures could come to be, but Lore sees something they do not—the SS officer managing the disposition of the prisoners is her father. They meet a young Jewish man who turns out to be a useful guide, protector, and scavenger for food. But Lore cannot overcome the anti-Semitism drilled into her, and her relationship with him is both tense and confused, mixing repulsion and desire. The younger children recognize him for what he is: a friend. Australian director Cate Shortland cast newcomer Saskia Rosendahl as Lore, and the young actress does a remarkable job, as do all the children (the baby was certainly an enthusiastic crier!). The film builds in power as the revelations of this difficult journey affect Lore, and she too faces moral choices and their consequences. "We know where this is going pretty early on," says reviewer Steven Boone for Roger Ebert.com, "but that doesn't prevent Lore from being riveting stuff, start to finish."

A drama set during a little known post-WW II period.

[diane-34 · 8/10 · 22 October 2012]

Lore is an intense drama involving a period of post-WW II German society that is rarely if ever examined and to do it, as this film does, from the viewpoint of German children caught up in these tragic days is worth a visit just out of curiosity. However, this film does not just take a dispassionate look from the viewpoint of historian's or news print, rather because of the wonderful direction of Cate Shortland, this movie moves completely away from ordinary story telling into the far less examined area of psychological change.

Superficially this story is about a family of young children who are forced because of Germany's WW II defeat to make their way from the Black Forrest to their grandmother's home near Hamburg in northern Germany. The story concerns the time before that long journey, the incidents of that journey and finally their arrival at their grandmother's home. Sounds simple and straight forward but the devil, as they say is in the details, or rather the story.

As the story unfolds while the children attempt to reach the grandmother's home, the viewer explores through the eldest, who leads this group, many of the consequences of her past history as a child growing in this family with all the mental baggage implied by this maturation. The drama is carried by this eldest child, Saskia Rosendahl, to whom many of the film's incidents occur.

Moviegoers might be struck by the close-ups used by the director; most of the movie's shots are taken at that range and viewers may not like the method. It contributes to an extremely distinct film, along with the story as well as Rosendahl's superb acting, which must affect the viewer and this after all is why we attend movies to begin.

Interesting

[billcr12 · 7/10 · 13 April 2013]

Saskia Rosendahl is Lore, a strong willed teenage German girl, who, due to the circumstances of the end of World War II must travel with a young sister, two little boy brothers, and an infant brother, after her mother and father leave them rather abruptly at the beginning of the film. On foot they venture through the Black Forest, scrounging for food, often begging from strangers along the way. They meet Thomas, a Jewish war camp refugee who helps them survive. This is a slow moving and bleak story, which is no surprise, given the subject matter. The saving grace is the wonderful and elegant performance by Miss Rosendahl. She is completely believable as the adolescent who must grow up very quickly. Although it is well worn territory, Lore is an interesting perspective on wartime Germany.

Unusual look at Hitler's supporters after the war

[Buddy-51 · 8/10 · 3 August 2013]

Based on the novel "The Dark Room" by Rachel Seiffert, the German/Australian co-production "Lore" takes a look at post-World War II Europe from an unusual vantage point - not that of Hitler's countless victims but of his many rank-and-file supporters (one might say adorers) in the days immediately following his downfall.

Lore (played by the remarkable Saskia Rosendahl) is a young woman who is forced to flee with her parents and four younger siblings into the Black Forest when the Americans "invade" their country, arresting Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers and liberating the concentration camps. When the mother and father are eventually apprehended, Lore is left to struggle on her own to provide for herself along with her sister and three younger brothers (one a newborn) as they search for the home of their paternal grandmother.

The screenplay by Robin Mukherjee and director Cate Shortland challenges the audience by asking us to empathize with a main character who is an unapologetic supporter of Hitler and a confirmed anti-Semite to boot (even if we sense it is a result of her background and upbringing). In fact, most of the people she encounters on her journey share similar delusions about their dear leader, whom they clearly still worship even in death. They've even convinced themselves that all these pictures they're being shown of the concentration camps is mere staged "propaganda" by the Americans - an attitude clearly designed to assuage their own guilt and deny their own complicity in the horrors their beloved Fuhrer brought about. This anti-Semitic philosophy is really put to the test when Lore and her siblings encounter Thomas (Kai Malina), a young Jewish man who claims to have spent time in a concentration camp and who helps the family in their struggles.

The writers clearly know that the audience, craving reassurance amid all the moral chaos, would like the characters' actions to be guided by an adherence to at least some type of moral code, yet the movie, aiming for a much more insightful and honest depiction of human nature, stubbornly refuses to cater to that desire. For instance, just as Thomas appears to be settling into the role of noble victim/savior, he goes ahead and commits an act so vile - if understandable in the context of the situation - that we are thrown back in a state of moral and emotional confusion - as is Lore. In a similar way, the relationship between Thomas and Lore remains enigmatic throughout, and, only towards the end, does Lore appear to be coming to terms with the fact that everything she's been taught and raised to believe in may, in fact, be a lie.

Yet, even with that slight ray of hope at the end, the thesis of the movie seems to be that there is nothing enriching or ennobling about war, and that when it comes down to a choice between survival and morality, survival will win every time. Morals and ethics, it appears, are fine when one has the comfort of civilization and the luxury of peace to accommodate them, but when one doesn't, it truly becomes a case of every man (and, in this instance, every woman) for himself. That may be a bleak and disturbing picture of mankind but, in the world of this movie, it seems a brutally honest one.

As director, Shortland consistently juxtaposes the ugliness of the characters' lives and situations with the lyricism of the photography and setting. The result is a though-provoking and artful addition to the litany of films about the Nazi era.

both harrowing and well-made... and depressing as a cold day in hell

[Quinoa1984 · 6/10 · 30 July 2016]

Lore is a drama set during the holocaust, but with a different perspective: instead of it focusing on, for example, Jews in a concentration camp, or on the Nazi officers, this is about the children of an SS officer who, along with their mother, gets interred. So the kids are on their own and have to make their way across a country practically to get to another relative. This is while the nation is under war and everything is devastating. In other words, it's Come and See, though not quite to that extent (but then what could be?)

Lore is, for lack of a better word than I can think of so this sums it up, is depressing. You feel drained as the minutes go by and see the devastation go by, though with so little relief that catharsis is lost. It's so unrelentingly bleak, and with such unlikable characters for the most part that it gets exhausting after a while. It sticks to its convictions and it has some harrowing poetry with its shots, but the results just leave you so drained - and not with the sort of catharsis that comes with The Road or Grave with the Fireflies (which this feels like a hybrid of in immediate post WW2 Germany).

Or to put it another way, it makes Germany Year Zero look like a Disney cartoon.

Terrible film-making

[susand1108 · 1/10 · 6 August 2017]

Simply put: terrible film-making. It seems they were trying to be artsy by using extreme close-up and shaky camera. Even though it's somewhat dizzying, I can handle artsy, but if you can't even tell your story, what's the point? Half the time, you don't know where the kids are and what is happening to them. Then you ask, why is every adult they encounter cruel? And why are all the allies are evil and ready to shoot them? Most of it makes no sense at all, and the parts that do are historically inaccurate. I was ready to shut it down halfway through, but my husband convinced me to hang in there. But for what? A pointless, disappointing ending.