Amrum (2025)
Amrum is a genuinely good film — the kind that earns its emotional weight without cheating for it. It asks its audience to spend ninety-three minutes in the company of a twelve-year-old Hitler Youth member and to leave caring deeply about him.
Spring 1945. The windswept North Frisian island of Amrum, a place so remote from the war’s machinery that seals still get hunted and fields still need tending. Twelve-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck, in a debut that announces a real talent) fishes at night, works the farm by day, and keeps the household alive while his Nazi officer father remains absent at the front. His mother Hille (Laura Tonke) sustains herself on ideology with the conviction of someone who has invested everything in a cause now visibly disintegrating. When Germany’s defeat becomes undeniable, Hille unravels badly, and Nanning — who never chose the world he was dropped into — must hold things together, practically and emotionally. Farmer Tessa (Diane Kruger) models a different way of facing the same facts, and the contrast does the film’s moral work far more efficiently than any speech could.
Director Fatih Akin works here from a script co-written with octogenarian filmmaker Hark Bohm, whose own Amrum childhood supplied the raw material. There is a productive irony — and in my opinion a strategically wise one — in a Turkish-German director being the person to examine how ordinary German families inhabited and transmitted ideology. Akin’s outsider position gives him room to look at German culpability without the defensiveness an insider might feel compelled to perform. Cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub photographs the island with the restraint the setting demands: mudflats, pale northern light, and a sea that gives and takes with equal indifference. Lindenlaub’s camera records without editorialising; the images carry their meaning without being steered toward it.
Billerbeck holds the film together without appearing to try. Nanning works from instinct and affection because the moral vocabulary he will eventually need has not yet been handed to him. The film’s real emotional charge comes from this gap between what the boy can feel and what he cannot yet name — a condition hardly confined to twelve-year-olds in 1945, or to Germans.
The restraint that gives Amrum its atmosphere occasionally shades into inertia. A handful of scenes run past the point at which they have done their work, and one or two supporting characters feel thinner than the film needs them to be. Akin trusts his central performance and his setting to carry the load, and they mostly do — but there are stretches where the film stalls where it should press.
Amrum belongs to that small and undervalued category of war films distinguished by what they withhold — no battlefields, no combat, no tidy redemptive arc. It gives you, instead, the long unresolved aftermath that children inherit from their parents’ choices. Depicting that aftermath, honestly and without melodrama, is harder than filming a battle — and the result stays with you longer.