Nearly 20 years after the Nuremberg trials, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963-1965) marked the first time Germans prosecuted fellow Germans for their involvement with the Nazi party during World War II. Labyrinth of Lies sheds light on this lesser known series of trials, but can’t help but fall into many of the same cliché traps that similar historical fictions often do.
Johann Radmann (Inglourious Basterds’ Alexander Fehling) is a public prosecutor, bored with the usual traffic cases he’s assigned. When journalist Thomas Gnielka (Andre Szymanski) brings to Radmann’s attention a former Nazi teaching at a nearby school, free and unpunished, Radmann takes it upon himself to find justice for those people whose lives this teacher potentially had a hand in destroying. The further Radmann explores the depths of horror that occurred decades before, the more he faces a Germany that will do anything to move beyond its awful past, in the process discovering just how closely the Nazi party touches his own life and those of his loved ones.
Radmann is an amalgam of three historical prosecutors, yet despite that, he’s little more than a bland receptacle for pertinent information. He’s told horrible truths—which are at this point mostly well-known crimes—that come off like repeated, expositional details, and the few elements we get of Radmann’s personal life feel completely irrelevant to the film’s overall story that is being told. His relationship with his girlfriend Marlene (Friederike Becht) goes absolutely nowhere, sufficing only to demonstrate that innocence and true love can still arise so recently after such atrocities.
In fact, Labyrinth of Lies hits every obvious note, from a moment of success after a montage of months of research, to the watering down of the described incidents for easier consumption, to Radmann’s drunk outrage at the information he’s been given, to, even, an “AHA” moment that helps Radmann crack his cases. Despite this, Labyrinth of Lies is still fascinating when investigating how a post-Nazi Germany so quickly, and efficiently, tried to forget its own past. Most of the people Radmann encounters are either naive as to what happened within their country or full of rage at Radmann’s insistence on not letting the past stay buried. The further Radmann digs, the more he begins to understand that almost everyone is, somehow, culpable. The weight of this burden for him becomes all too real.
When first time feature co-writer/director Giulio Ricciarelli and co-writer Elisabeth Bartel look into the heart of the mostly unknown story of Germany soon after the eradication of the Nazis, Labyrinth of Lies becomes a compelling dissection of the ways in which even the most well-intentioned people attempt to rewrite history. Yet, Labyrinth of Lies, in indulging too many all-too-familiar tropes throughout, takes away from the dire story at hand to lean into the generic nature of building a narrative around a very complex reality. This is just the danger in trying to make black and white so many shades of gray.
Director: Giulio Ricciarelli
Writers: Giulio Ricciarelli, Elisabeth Bartel
Starring: Alexander Fehling, Andre Szymanski, Friederike Becht
Release Date: September 30, 2015
Ross Bonaime is a D.C.-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.