Opening Scene: Nelly is being driven across the border by her friend, Lene, her head completely wrapped in bandages. When a guard refuses to let them pass through a checkpoint without her first removing the dressings, the camera cuts from her slowly unwinding the strips to the guard’s shamefaced reaction to the damage unveiled. Quickly ordering the other guards to let them go, they continue on their way to a doctor who is able to perform facial reconstruction surgery. Still alive because the Nazis had assumed she was dead from a gunshot wound to the face, Nelly is able to afford surgery through inheritance—she is the lone member of her family to survive the Holocaust.

There have been many powerful films created about the inhumanity perpetrated against the millions sent to concentration camps. Christian Petzold’s “Phoenix” (2014) focuses on what it means to survive and the psychological toll of redefining who you are after so much loss. Ruthlessly tense and with a can’t-look-away-from lead performance by Nina Hoss as Nelly Lenz (also star of Petzold’s movie, “Barbara”), the film gets its shock, not from trying to recreate the historical violence which can only ever pale against the real thing, but instead adheres to the thinking that sometimes it’s worse to leave the unimaginable to the imagination. From the very first scene, of not showing Nelly’s face, Petzold stays loyal to this idea and while his film may lack in blood and gore this is no way reflects a censorship or softening of the realities of genocide. If anything Nelly has her fair share of both physical and mental trauma to struggle with, as she continues to cling to the one hope that kept her going in the camps: that of reuniting with her German husband, Johnny.

Where Johnny is concerned, however, Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) is notably tightlipped. Both women are Jewish but while Lene was able to escape to London during the war, Nelly was caught in hiding. Since then Lene has been working to help uncover the fate of missing family members by combing through records and photos of victims. Increasingly angry and depressed, for her Germany can never be home again and her dream is to travel to Palestine and create a Jewish state where they cannot be persecuted. She wants Nelly to come with her.

Yet for Nelly the desire to have things return to the way they were before Hitler came to power outweighs all else, and despite being constantly confronted with change (a trip to her destroyed home; her very appearance in a mirror) she continues to search for a way to reclaim the life that was stolen from her. Believing the answer to be in finding Johnny, and unhearing to Lena's eventual warnings that he was the one who gave her up to the Nazis, she goes in search for him at local night clubs (the couple had both been musicians). Inevitably, she is successful.

It is here that the lack of a concrete image of what Nelly looked like before her surgery truly pays off, with one of the most infuriatingly compelling and surprising relationship dynamics I've ever seen play out on screen. For when Johnny continues to see Nelly only as a woman who vaguely looks like his wife--a woman that can help him with a scam to get his real, dead wife's inheritance--we, like Nelly, don't know what to believe.

This shared uncertainty between protagonist and audience drives the plot forward to a conclusion that is equal parts chilling and satisfying. Through the Lenz marriage, the film manages to zone in on an overall sense of denial that seems to have enveloped the country at the time—no one knows how much the other person knew about what was happening, but everyone is suspicious; people wants to move on but can't be allowed to have it that easy.

Neither can viewers. Between the complicated feelings generated by the storyline and Petzold's framing of shots, which display a subtle control over symbolic imagery, "Phoenix" is a feature not to be missed.

Phoenix is currently playing at the Ritz 5, Ambler, and Bryn Mawr Film Institute.