Lore is a film about life in Germany after they lost World War II, focusing on a family’s attempt to travel across Germany on foot to get to relatives. It excels at painting a picture of the desolation, hopelessness, and utter confusion as life is turned upside down by the occupying armies. It does this rather literally – the cast walks silently around a lot of bombed-out buildings, lonely forests and fields, and they scrounge around for food and transportation.

Lore does not have much dialog, so you really don’t get to know the characters very well. It’s painting a portrait of a situation in time and place, more than telling a story about people, and this makes the film feel a little slow and definitely limits its emotional impact to a rather abstract kind of appreciation. The camera work is a little distracting because the director is in love with the extreme close up – the back of a person’s heal from one inch away, the upper half of a cheekbone from one inch away, a person’s eye from one inch away. It gets annoying at times, but it was not bad enough or frequent enough to spoil the film’s good points.

Once you’ve seen Lore you would never need to see it again. But it is an interesting and fairly gripping dramatization of a piece of history that we don’t think much about. It’s at Cinema Village in NYC, so I can’t imagine it got very wide distribution, but if you get a chance to see it, I would recommend it.