‎Transit (2018) directed by Christian Petzold • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd

Transit

2018 Directed by Christian Petzold

The German troops are just outside Paris. Georg escapes to Marseille at the last moment. His luggage contains the legacy of a writer named Weidel, who took his own life out of fear of persecution. This legacy comprises a manuscript, some letters and the Mexican Embassy’s assurance of a visa. Only those who can prove that they will leave are allowed in this port town, and this means you need an entry permit from a potential host country. Assuming the identity of Weidel, Georg tries to obtain one of the few scarce passages on a ship.

Franz Rogowski Paula Beer Godehard Giese Lilien Batman Barbara Auer Matthias Brandt Sebastian Hülk Àlex Brendemühl Ronald Kukulies Maryam Zaree Emilie de Preissac Antoine Oppenheim Louison Tresallet Justus von Dohnányi Trystan Pütter

101 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

"- He is not my son.
- What difference does that makes? She is not my wife."

Walking through the ruins of the European project be it 1940s or 2010s. A series of echoes. Dreaming of a new world that doesn't really exisst. Hunted by other dreams, other fictions, other movies (sometimes Petzold's own movies). History on loop. As almost always with Petzold, it is a conceptual ghost story. Perhaps a little too neat, but there's something thrilling about watching it gain flesh.
Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★★ 3

[8]

The films of Christian Petzold can be maddeningly perfect at times, to the extent that their flawless construction relies on some form of neat but implausible narrative coincidence. This is what kept me from fully embracing Phoenix, to say nothing of Barbara and Yella. These are films as ideal objects, generated to get somewhere without a lot of extraneous, messy life intruding on their closed systems.

What made Phoenix such a step forward for Petzold, and actually makes Transit something of a great leap, is the filmmaker's broader embrasure of abstraction. In the earlier films, he seemed to be adopting genre templates, if anything, in order to bring them closer to reality. (Jerichow, his best film to date, is…
Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½ 2

This is absolutely fantastic and I would be stunned if it didn't end up being one of the highlights of the year. Not a film I think a person could throughly write on based on one viewing, but the structural motif of using dialogue stripped from the original setting of the 1940s and placing it in the present day is simple and ingenious. If it takes time (or a second viewing) to write cohesively on this it's likely because of how well this conceit plays out - making the slightly more melodramatic/romantic turn even more difficult to articulate - though it's no less affecting. Still, I wonder how this film would play without having at least an awareness of the…
Review by davidehrlich ★★★½ 3

A man arrives in purgatory, eager to learn his eternal fate. The divine judgement, however, is slow to arrive. The minutes turn to hours, the hours turn to days, and the days begin to blur together in a place where time has no meaning. Eventually, after what feels to him like a hundred years, the man begs for a verdict. “What are you talking about?” comes the reply. “You’ve been in hell since you got here.”

That grim parable is told to Georg (“Happy End” breakout Franz Rogowski) roughly halfway into Christian Petzold’s “Transit,” and yet the poor bastard doesn’t seem to realize that it’s about him. The inscrutable hero of an inscrutable film that unfolds like a remake of…
Review by josh lewis ★★★★

a ghost story. petzold takes anna seghers' WWII melodrama and brings it into the realm of the uncanny by having it take place in an unspecific, contemporary context. past, present and future all bleed into each other as our knowledge of WWII movies is tested by our awareness of the modern rise (and broader acceptance) of fascist rhetoric and images evoking the current european refugee crisis. petzold’s previous film drew a lot of hitchcock comparisons for its Vertigo inspired narrative and here he wields a similar identity thriller/perverse romance where a lone refugee named georg, out of survival, assumes the identity of a well-known communist writer, using his name to secure a visa and finds himself falling in love with…
Review by Jake Cole ★★★★

Petzold steps outside his influences to craft a thematic and stylistic follow-up to Phoenix that may top even that film for thoughtful yet vibrant consideration of Germany's unpayable moral debt. Blending the contemporary migrant crisis with the Holocaust, Petzold makes a powerful case that the rejection of refugees reflects the worst of his country's history, yet he illustrates this through the eerie calm of a kind of ghost story where people are constantly disappearing either out of good or bad luck and you only find out what kind of luck it was if luck is on your side as well. Petzold makes such calm thrillers, but they feel so profoundly urgent.

Recent reviews

Review by Red ★★★★

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Review by Eslamov ★★★★½

كسم العظمة
Review by Chris Holden ★★★½

And the Academy Award for most glaringly obvious end credit needle drop goes to...

(In all honesty this is good, but thing about "nothing ever changes and we're trapped in a hell of stasis" movies is that they can usually be twice and short and lose nothing. This is no exception)
Review by diver ★★★

Great color. Wanted to see a Christian Petzold film for some time now. Good first impression of a filmmaker. I like how he does action too.
Review by Juan Ramirez ★★★★½

Christian Petzold's latest film is another masterwork of mistaken identity and an eloquently crafted story of ordinary people whose lives have been physically and emotionally displaced by the chaos of war. I suspect that once Transit is officially released in 2019, the film's ambiguous setting will prove divisive to some viewers but I was absolutely enthralled by its timelessness. Does the film take place in the 1940's? Is it present day? Is it a Post-Apocalyptic future? With Fascists on the march and a community of refugees in hiding, it is clear that Petzold is making parallels between Europe's past and present conflicts. At no point does it feel heavy-handed. Transit also works as a time-ticking Melodrama with a doomed love…
Review by Peter Gavaris ★★★★

Like it’s characters, the film dwells in a kind of limbo — a liminal space of subtle abstraction where both the historical past and cinematic past intermingle with the present. As the title implies, this is a film about unavoidable, almost fatalistic intermediacy where the future is grim and there’s nothing to be done about it. We know this because we know that the Germans will occupy France, but Petzold’s brilliant conceptual device (for those unaware, he has this story of German refugees set in 1942 play out in the streets of contemporary France) defamiliarizes both past and present. Nazis have been replaced by riot squads, and it all feels akin. We meet characters in motion, lost in the blur…
Review by Anderson Castro ★★★½

Quando nos adequamos a cadência dos filmes de Petzold, passamos a identificar as causas da ausência da dimensão emocional no qual seus personagens estão imersos.
Review by B Loayza ★★★★½

A modern-dress interpretation of the german occupation of france and the people struggling to escape (to mexico, to the u.s., etc.) that also makes reference to the current refugee crisis. Kafkaesque and difficult and beautiful.
Review by MHORKY ★★★★★

Petzold toys with narrative displacement in ways that shouldn’t work, but ultimately give new meaning to the source material. As timely a film as ever, and wow Franz Rogowski gives the performance of the year.