Movie Review—Anthropoid

Anthropoid

by Peter J. O’Connell

Anthropoid. Released: Aug. 2016. Runtime: 120 mins. MPAA Rating: R for violence and some disturbing images.

“Anthropoid” is a term referring to an ape—more generally, a beast resembling a human. Operation Anthropoid was one of the most dramatic incidents of World War II—the assassination in 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, the vicious Nazi ruler of the occupied Czech lands. Heydrich, a Hitler favorite and architect of the “Final Solution” (Holocaust), was known as the “Butcher of Prague,” the “Blond Beast” and the “Hangman.”

Now Anthropoid, directed and co-written by Sean Ellis, tells the fact-based story of the plot to kill the Beast. The film begins in late 1941 when a small group of fighters sent by the Czech government-in-exile in London is parachuted into the Nazi-ruled country. Two of them are Jan Kibis (Jamie Dornan) and Josef Gibcik (Cillian Murphy). They become the main characters in the film. The difficulty of telling patriots from collaborators soon becomes evident when two supposed local resistance fighters offer aid to Kibis and Gibcik. The “resistance fighters,” however, actually turn out to be traitors.

After killing one of the traitors, Kibis and Gibcik proceed to Prague, where they spend several months in a safe house planning the assassination of Heydrich, hampered by limited intel and little equipment. The two men do, however, develop warm relationships with the family in the house but engage in some heated exchanges with local resistance leaders, who doubt that Operation Anthropoid can be pulled off and dread the inevitable Nazi reprisals even if it can.

Finally, amid ratcheting suspense, the time comes for the assassination attempt. The attack seems well planned, but then . . . . Well, you know the old saying about the “best-laid plans.” However, Heydrich (Detlef Bothe, with an amazing resemblance to the man he plays) does die as a result of the attack.

And then the feared reprisals begin. And they are horrendous. Thousands, including characters whom we have come to be fond of, are imprisoned, tortured, killed. In one particularly excruciating torture, a young violinist has his hands hammered while being “waterboarded” with whiskey and shown the severed head of his mother in a fish tank. The reprisals are made even more wrenching when it becomes known that a trusted person has become an informer.

Eventually, the small band of lightly armed patriots responsible for the assassination has to make a stand in a church against hundreds of SS troops, who use heavy machine guns, explosives, gas and even fire hoses. The sequence is brilliantly staged and quite moving.

Ellis’ direction is economical but deft and makes good use of location shooting in the Czech Republic, including at some sites where the actual historical events took place. His British leads and Czech, Slovak and German supporting cast all do a fine job. The film is a powerful reminder of the truth that “freedom is not free.”

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) Noted Austrian/German director Fritz Lang stated that Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels offered to make him the head of Germany’s film production. The anti-Nazi Lang declined and fled to France and then the U.S., where over a 25-year period he made a number of classic films. One, Hangmen Also Die (1943), was inspired by the Heydrich assassination but was not fact-based (because all the facts were not yet known in 1943). (2) The intriguingly titled HHhH is another film on the Heydrich assassination and is scheduled to come out later this year.