If you want to experience a guided tour through the soulless architectural sins of Berlin in the summer, you should be inspired by Scorched Earth. But the gallery of parking lots, aseptic hotel corridors and industrial wastelands is not the only reason to cool off from the heist film in July.
Thomas Arslan’s late sequel to the minimalist In the Shadows keeps you entertained with sophisticated raids, chases and a taciturn underworld staff.
The heist thriller impresses with its sober style
The last time we saw him was in 2010, the career criminal Trojan (Misel Maticevic from Babylon Berlin). At that time, he had fled into the darkness after a confrontation with a drug-dealing cop and a hitman duo. Years later he returns to Berlin. Trojan needs money and gets involved in the robbery of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
Together with computer expert Chris (Bilge Bingül), getaway driver Diana (Marie Leuenberger) and his old friend Luca (Tim Seyfi), he methodically plans the coup. Can they trust the mysterious client and his henchman Victor (Alexander Fehling)?
Anyone who has seen a handful of gangster and crime films in their life knows the answer. In the script of Scorched Earth, the set pieces of the genre are lined up one after the other: the criminal who returns to his old territory after a long time, the team of opposing characters, and backers who don’t stick to their agreements.
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Misel Maticevic in Scorched Earth
Even In the Shadows was characterized less by the originality of the story than by its economical design. Crime and violence were captured with extreme sobriety, which made the career criminal’s everyday life seem all the more lonely. Scorched earth connects seamlessly with this atmosphere. As if Trojan had never left, and yet everything had changed.
Alexander Fehling amuses as a pithy villain
Few things in German cinema feel as at home and alienating at the same time as the sight of Misel Maticevic sipping coffee in a bakery and spying on a pedestrian passage.
The silent professional Trojan sneaks through a world of double games and false promises. Alexander Fehling’s Victor emerges as his opponent in Scorched Earth. Fehling plays the guy with obvious malicefluffy, way too cool and quite amusing.
The hard-boiled character miniatures like Victor or test driver Diana enliven the vision of the underworld in Scorched Earth. Gone is the sense of a milieu, of betting shops and dark side streets. 12 years after In the Shadow, what remains of Berlin crime is a gentrified market that is subject to the greed and arbitrariness of the rich.
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Alexander Fehling in Scorched Earth
It is a gloomy portrait of the underworld that is drawn in Scorched Earth, quite similar in soul to David Fincher’s freelance nightmare The Killer, via a detour to Jean-Pierre Melville and Don Siegel.
You can’t trust anyoneThere are no codes of honor and in the end there is always a bigger fish waiting for its prey.
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But this film can by no means be described as sad. The raids are orchestrated too precisely and elegantly for that, The script’s feints, twists and tricks are too much fun for that.
There’s still Trojan, a film hero who may not have any money (or luck), but he does have brains. A hero whose life, unlike the genre relatives from Heat, Criminal Squad or recently The Channel – Brothers in Arms, consists only of work. But if someone is as good at their job as he is, they can sip as many coffee cups as they want.
Scorched Earth was shown in the Panorama of the Berlinale 2024. The film will be released in German cinemas on July 18th.