Did you people see the same film I saw?

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

If you have trouble sleeping slip this one in the DVD player, Slow to the point of being dam near static. The acting was generally awful and the story line ridiculous. Avoid at all cost. We will not be watching it again in the future.

"Phoenix" tells the story of a Schoah survivor, who undergoes medical surgery on her face and moves back into her old environment. There she meets her husband, who reportedly turned her in. He notices her similarity to his wife and hires her to play her to get his hands on her money. Now, reunited with her former husband, she begins to raises question in a bitter search for her old life.The plot is very powerful. It is a clever script that allows for big emotions, desperation and uncertainty. Sometimes I would have wished that these emotions would have been displayed even more to break into the rather calm tone of the film. However this is not just an addition to the cinematographic topic but it is a whole new approach, produced very professionally and looking worthy.All in all this is a film you should give a try for it is outstanding in its way and doesn't copy others. For me the last bit was missing to make it even more moving and lasting but it nevertheless is a great piece of filmmaking.

It's Germany after WWII. Nelly Lenz is a Nazi camp survivor with facial disfigurements. She and her companion Lene Winter are returning home to retrieve their family inheritances. She gets reconstruction surgery resulting in a slightly different face. She wants to reunite with her husband Johnny Lenz despite Lene's insistence that he's the one who turned her in to the Nazis. Lene wants to build the new state of Israel. Nelly finds Johnny working at the nightclub Phoenix. He doesn't recognize her and wants her to pretend to be Nelly for a split of her estate.Expositions in movies are often derided but a good exposition is a necessity. There are a lot of murky questions. The movie doles out the story in dribs and drabs. I still don't know Nelly and Lene's actual relationship, and why Nelly assumes the identity of Esther. I'm more willing to buy into the central premise of her conflicted feelings about Johnny and his cluelessness to her true identity. It's a fascinating interior conflict and there's a real tension about the truth of her discovery.

One of the international darlings of the New Berlin Film School, Petzold, strikes gold again with Phoenix a twisted Vertigo-ian tale of obsession, identity and a brutal examination of marriage set against the backdrop of bombed out, postwar Berlin. Petzold regular Nina Hoss plays Nelly Lenz, a disfigured concentration camp survivor who is (somewhat) unrecognizable after having her face reconstructed. Once Nelly is well enough she begins a search through the city to find her non-Jewish husband Johnny—played by another Petzold familiar Ronald Zehrfeld—who may or may not have turned Nelly into the Nazis. It is truly a yarn and only grows more complex, bewildering, yet engrossing as the film continues. In terms of plot Petzold has asked the audience to accept a lot…and I mean a lot. Sure. There are a few plot holes along the way, but if the audience makes the stretch to buy the conceit Petzold is selling they will be gratefully rewarded.Quite possibly the most refreshing quality of Phoenix is its melodramatic qualities in a day and age where melodramas just aren't made well. Maybe the term "melodrama" is too strong, but the film certainly does portray some tropes of melodrama. Phoenix visually does bare some resemblance to 1950s Hollywood but the polished, meticulous, "constructed-realism" (which falls just right of the hardcore realism that seems to be the dominant brand of our time) of the interiors and bombed out buildings recalls Fassbinder's melodramas after he fell in love with the films of Douglas Sirk. The color schemes are rich, heightening muted tones and accentuating primary colors, as seen at the Phoenix Club in the American-sector of the city that shines a vibrant, neon blood red. Each color scheme seems to fit every mood to perfection and the wreckage of the city physically and morally works as a perfect mirroring metaphor for the main characters. The performances are perfect. They are rich and refrained. Zehrfeld is wonderful lost in moral ambiguity and at unmasking his demons subtly and with earnest. Hoss and Zehrfeld definitely have a great working chemistry as they worked together in Petzold's last Barbara. As the story progresses the dance the two actors do only deepens. Nelly, who is going by the name Esther, is transforming—at the direction of her unknowing husband—into the Nelly that existed before the war. The obsession comes from Nelly. She will not accept the direction in which all signs are pointing. Johnny only wants to use "Esther" to come back as Nelly so they can receive a survivor's check… I refrain from going to deep and giving away spoilers. What is important is that Petzold is most certainly an artist to keep an eye on, a reputation which he has already established and old perpetuates with the accomplishment of this lush, psychological melodrama that beckons to a time past in film history. In Phoenix he has crafted a complex, flawed, beautiful and heart-wrenching film that makes us question the bounds of love and personal identity and how the foundations of these concepts can be shaken by the larger context of the outside world—in this case WWII and the Holocaust. Though the plot may be a bit much, with some holes here and there, Petzold never lets the story get out of hand, maintaining a very deliberate pace that moves the story along, keeps the complexities of the narrative taut and clear, all the while building tension step by step; tension that reaches the most profound understated crescendo that should leave any viewer stunned.