★★★★☆
Central Europe, 1945: You probably wouldn’t want to be recruited to a Soviet secret commando unit who are moving “something” out of Berlin and into Leningrad. Said “something” comes in a coffin-sized box, must be buried every night, and is sought desperately by German “Werwolf” units.
You may not be familiar with the Werwolf units, and if not then it’s hard to blame you; World War pictures focused on the Eastern front are few and far between, unless they come out of Russia (or Ukraine, or Poland, &c.), never mind that Russia and China suffered much greater losses than every other Allied power combined, or that around 80% of German casualties came from the Eastern front. It was those very losses that inspired the creation of the Werwolf, which was to be a sort of partisan militia, operating near or behind enemy lines. In practice, it was quoted as being “like its commanding officer, inefficient, weak, and uninspired”.
So much for history, though. In Burial the Werwolfs are terrifying; part revanchists fuelled by bloodlust and rape, part literal werewolf. Burial manipulates the intrinsic horror of hatred, expertly stirring together misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-Communism and ethnic tensions into one thoroughly toxic cocktail. The Nazis were such comic-book villains – or rather, the villains of comic books, and Star Wars and The Lion King and everything else have drawn so extensively from the Nazis – that it’s easy to treat the war as a source of guilt-free escapist violence. No-one is upset when Tarantino massacres Nazis in Inglourious Basterds, any more than when he massacres slavers in Django Unchained or Manson cultists in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… (or ninjas in Kill Bill. Fuck ninjas.). But this line of thinking obscures that, just war or not, all war is Hell.
Not Burial, though, an admirable film which proves that it’s possible to make a conscientious and intelligent WWII adventure that’s as gripping as Inglourious Basterds, or Raiders of the Lost Ark or Where Eagles Dare, without reducing the war to “the goodies and the baddies”. Nor must war crimes be solely explored in self-serious exercises in misery such as Schindler’s List or The Pianist.