The World Will Tremble, 2025.
Written and Directed by Lior Geller.
Starring Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Jeremy Neumark Jones, David Kross, Michael Epp, Anton Lesser, Michael Epp, George Lenz, Charlie MacGechan, Leonard Proxauf, Tim Bergmann, Adi Kvetner, Aleksandra Kostova, Oliver Möller, and Danny Scheinmann.
SYNOPSIS:
The incredible, untold true story of how a group of prisoners attempt a seemingly impossible escape from the first Nazi death camp in order to provide the first eyewitness account of the Holocaust.
In Nazi occupied Poland, there is (obviously) some fever-pitch frustration among the regularly overworked and abused laborers slaving away in The World Will Tremble, with some suggesting that it’s high time to make an escape. With a tiny knife in possession (snatched out of the dirt while digging on a job), there is a small window of opportunity to do so. However, another laborer says they are alive and to stick it out. No one knew that the Germans were well on their way to creating the first death camp, using death by gas within trucks as a twisted prelude to gas chambers. More sickeningly is that these methods of murder came to be because, as one Nazi puts it, gleefully killing Jews became traumatic on the Germans.
Writer/director Lior Geller’s miserable but tense The World Will Tremble is relatively self-contained, taking place over a couple of days and gradually revealing the more extreme genocidal actions the Germans have planned. Surprising no one, the story moves from one tragedy to another, somehow each more disturbing than the last. This ranges from the Jewish mass burying their own, occasionally in depressingly coming across loved ones, to fatal truck rides, to demented games of testing Nazi shooter accuracy. They still need target practice, so sometimes bottles are placed on the heads of the laborers; whatever happens, happens. Conventionally attractive women are also left alive for unspeakable reasons.
That’s not to say this film is solely an onslaught of trauma. It does build to an equally suspenseful escape after a pair of laborers decide that it’s now or never and that they need to spread the word to safer areas that the Germans are planning on genocide. On the other hand, it also feels almost exploitative to take a situation from these horrors and break it down into a run-of-the-mill cat-and-mouse thriller, which isn’t exactly helped by characters indistinguishable from one another. Everyone’s defining trait seems to be how willing they are to escape or not.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Neumark Jones still give compelling performances (especially the former, slowly breaking down while revealing the horrors to a rabbi in disbelief), but no one is given much of a character to work with here. It’s primarily about recounting the facts, which is also acceptable here since the film is involving and does build to a trembling finale.
While it is difficult to make anything that feels fresh or groundbreaking in this subgenre of human atrocities committed during World War II, The World Will Tremble overcomes that familiarity through competently harrowing and thrilling nuts-and-bolts filmmaking. There is an escalation in horror to everything that’s happening, which reaches a breaking point, prompting a daring escape that eventually leads to a traumatic processing breakdown. That cumulative emotional impact hits hard.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
