Spun out from a premise simultaneously implausible and sublime. PHOENIX reworks VERTIGO to deliver a stunning treatise on romantic and national delusion. Holocaust survivor Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss) receives plastic surgery and returns to Germany after the war in search of her husband (Ronald Zehrfeld) who may have turned her over to the SS. He fails to recognize her, but believes that she might convincingly pass as his "dead" wife (that is to say, as herself) in a scheme to reclaim her confiscated inheritance. She will re-appear fresh from the camps in a stunning dress, with nary a hair out of place-the sparkling embodiment of the German people's denial of their own complicity in genocide.

In German with English subtitles