A ravishing and haunting melodrama set in Berlin after the Second World War, Phoenix is the story of disfigured Holocaust survivor Nelly (Nina Hoss). A doctor reconstructs her badly injured face, but she only partly resembles her former self when she finds her estranged husband, pianist Johannes (Ronald Zehrfeld), in a nightclub. She says her name is Esther. He notices the resemblance and concocts a plot: "Esther" will pose as his wife, whom he presumes dead in a camp, and they will collect an inheritance after staging a homecoming. She plays along to newly acquaint herself with the man she loved and lost, but the ruse intensifies and turns when she begins to suspect he turned her into the Nazis in the first place. It is a tastily perverse cinematic conceit, one which would have fit snugly in a 1940s or '50s film with Jennifer Jones or Gene Tierney: a haunted woman playing another woman who is in turn impersonating herself...plus her studly, yet perhaps nefarious husband! And this well-acted and handsomely assembled production, perhaps best described as a elegiac mystery, uses it intelligently. And it builds to a dynamite final sequence; one can almost hear the director and cast proudly drop the microphone, so incisive and elegant is the climactic beat before the final curtain.

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