Transit

2018 Directed by Christian Petzold

In an attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Georg assumes the identity of a dead author but soon finds himself stuck in Marseilles, where he falls in love with Maria, a young woman searching for her missing husband.

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

Alternative Titles

통행증, 트랜짓

war romance drama

101 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★½ 5

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 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 exist. Haunted 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 ★★★★ 4

[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 Lucy ★★★★ 2

“who is the first to forget: he who is left, or she who left him?”
inconspicuously captivating. the last half hour was so calmly stressful that i could feel my own heartbeat. i need to rewatch phoenix
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 ★★★★ 3

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 iana ★★★★ 2

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

georg’s little smile at the end, oh god, why do the tiniest things destroy me
Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 2

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.
Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★★

É muito absurdo a maneira como o Petzold constrói um universo ultra rigoroso, mas que está sempre à deriva. Uma ambiguidade entre o que é concreto e o que é espectro, o que é presença e o que é lembrança. Não é simplesmente um cinema de sugestões (como são os Coen, por exemplo), mas sim de uma indeterminação concreta e possibilitadora.
Um constante entre-tempos (ninguém chega aonde deveria chegar, ninguém está onde quer) que cria um mundo de projeções. Acho que o cara continua refilmando Vertigo não porque quer, mas porque talvez seja a única história possível nos dias de hoje. A indeterminação e o autoengano como uma espécie de falsa esperança que te mantém vivo. Sem condições...
Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★

German Joaquin Phoenix is even better than German Brendan Fraser.
Review by Peter Labuza ★★★½ 1

A great showcase for Neapolitan Pizza representation in cinema.
Review by laura ★★★★½ 1

christian petzold is incapable of making a film that doesn’t feel like pure poetry. something about them takes control of my heartbeat in a way, synchronizing me with his characters. always takes a minute to readjust once they end. and i have to find my own feet again.

Recent reviews

Review by Agustín Saba ★★★★½

Petzold te cuenta una historia adentro de una caja de fosforos y te pasea por todo el mundo sin salir de la caja.
La vi más de una vez, la volvería a ver.
Review by deni ★★★★½

"they say that those who've been left never forget, but it's not true. [...] pity is with them. those who leave, no one is with them."
so endearing, christian petzold directs his films in a way that i can't even properly describe what it makes me feel. truly amazing.
Review by SUJIN_ ★★★½

휘날리는 시대, 스쳐가는 인연, 상처받는 영혼.
Review by Ba1ll1e ★★★½

Die Vögel über das Haus fliegt
Review by 𝕛𝕒𝕔𝕜 ★★★★ 1

The re-emerging nightmare of fascism throwing a dark blanket of disarray over our identities and relations as everyone scrambles to flee the inevitable.
A surreal contrast between running from this returning nightmare and the facade of modern normality is created through the unsettling and ambiguous period the story takes place in (an adaptation of a WWII novel set in modern times, with many blurred lines between the two). Rather than this confused context being frustrating, it gives a pervasive feeling to the world of the story that is uncannily relevant to our own times: the feeling that social and political apocalypse has already begun and yet the modern illusion of stasis still covers our day to to day lives. We…
Review by Courtney ★★

This would have been better as a play.
Review by michaelps ★★★★½

Fuck I love going into movies blind.
Review by sisisiona ★★★★

*sigh* the last scene...
My heart just couldn't bear anymore 🥺
Review by hassemarre ★★★★

Beautifully woven literary language into a tense film.
Review by caitlindan

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

I don't think I've ever been more baffled by a music choice than when Talking Heads played through the credits, I had to check I hadn't accidentally leaned on my Spotify
Also sinking the Montreal? very very 'arsh
Review by Thesp ★★★★

The modern setting jarred a bit : modern but not modern enough : no mobile phones and old era passports: felt like a half way house a cop out. On the other hand it kept things old world simple: no high tech sci go like pursuits. Focus on the acting. Which was good. Except again the female femme fatale appears: this months watched long journey into the night and it was the same thing: the seductress who sleeps with everyone but it’s all transactional. Marie was all over the place: her husband , her lover thebsociroe and then the main protagonist: to the end she didn’t know who or what she wanted : so I guess she had it all: just didn’t seem very happy with it. Apart from this feminist gripe, the rest was good. Definitely a 60s film feel which I personally liked.
Review by ozany ★★★★½

“Those who leave, no one is with them. They have no songs” ❤️