THE WORLD WILL TREMBLE - Mark Reviews Movies

The World Will Tremble, Vertical

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 13, 2025

Near the center of Poland, the first of the Nazis' death camps was established near the village of Chelmno. The World Will Tremble is seemingly the first movie to depict a story of this specific place of mass murder, as well as the story of the first people to escape from an extermination camp. It's a chapter of history that needs to be told, of course, but as a movie, writer/director Lior Geller's dramatized account is far too familiar and derivative of more successful and potent films on similar subject matter.

In particular, Geller's screenplay has an unfortunate habit of having its characters explain everything we need to know—most of which we are already aware, after decades of historical accounts and similar dramatizations. Considering the lengthy sections of the movie dedicated to simply suggesting or directly showing us the horrors of the Chelmno camp, the characters' often expository nature feels especially strained.

The main characters here are Solomon (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Michael (Jeremy Neumark Jones), both of them based on real people who were held at the camp, assigned to the terrible job of digging mass graves and filling them with murdered bodies, and did escape from Chelmno. Before the end credits, Michael Podchlebnik, the man who inspired that second character, is seen in an interview some decades after the war, and in that moment, we're reminded that no dramatization of these stories can stand up to the devastating potency of such first-hand accounts of the Shoah.

Podchlebnik would die a few years after giving that interview, and as generations of survivors die, there will come a time, as unthinkable as it might have been only a generation ago, that people might forget this history. There's an argument to be made that some around the world are more than eager to repeat the politics that began it all in the first place.

As clumsy as the writing and manipulative as the filmmaking may be here, then, Geller's movie remains important to some degree. What it shows before Solomon and Michael's efforts to escape Chelmno, in order to get some eyewitness account of what's happening at the camp to other Jewish people in Poland and to the world at large, are the early stages of the Nazis' systematic murder of Jews and others they deemed "undesirable."

The movie is at its most haunting and horrifying in its moments of relative and paradoxical stillness. In long shots and takes, Geller shows us Solomon, Michael, and other men forced to burial duty by the Nazis digging, following a truck from the grave back to the manor at the center of the camp, and waiting.

Another truck arrives, and as the German soldiers encourage the men and women and children in the back to exit the transport, the commander of the camp, a regularly smiling man named Lange (David Kross), tells the new arrivals that he has heard of their mistreatment in the ghettos. The officer tells them their troubles are now finished, promises he will keep tabs on their valuables, and informs them that a shower awaits.

Through all of this, the camera stays with Solomon, Michael, and the diggers, as the crowds enter the manor, begin screaming, and are led on to the truck that the burial detail had just followed. All of those men have to walk back to the grave from where they came, as the people inside the truck cry out and pound on the walls. The Nazis have attached a tube from the truck's exhaust and fed it into a hole leading inside the back.

There's an atrocious efficiency to this, and the way Geller portrays it, from the perspective the burial team on a redundant walk to and away from the manor and back to the mass grave, is striking in how slow and mundane the process is for something so horrendous. It's undercut, perhaps, by the movie's other, most intrusive element apart from the dialogue, which is the score by Erez Koskas.

We notice the music's alternately melancholy and intense strings, because the camera work is so removed from what's happening and the editing takes its time to show us that trek. As the two men come up with a plan to escape and watch as others in their group are killed and actually do free themselves of the camp, the score remains a constant—always telling us how to feel, instead of simply allowing the imagery to speak for itself. It's a harrowing enough story on its own, as Solomon and Michael must navigate the forest near the camp, avoid or outwit Nazi soldiers they encounter on their way, and find a rabbi (played by Anton Lesser), who has contacts to an underground network that could spread the pair's eyewitness testimony, within what's left of a neighboring ghetto for Jewish people who haven't yet been forcibly removed.

The story, in other words, is vital and compelling and suspenseful on its own merits, but the filmmaking on display in The World Will Tremble doesn't quite trust it enough. We don't need to have characters explain exactly what's happening at any given moment or to have the music inform us how to feel, when the details and experience of this story are clear enough. Such tactics don't make this story somehow more important or powerful, but they do detract from one that could have been.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products