Metacritic reviews

The movie ends abruptly, setting up an epilogue that viewers will have to provide for themselves. Jerichow's sparseness, tiny cast, and minimal plot can make the film seem a little elusive, but there’s a certain elegance to Petzold's concision, too. He shows all he wants us to see.

A tightly constructed "dramatic thriller" in which the tension comes as much from what the characters are thinking as from what they end up doing, Jerichow again confirms writer-helmer Christian Petzold ("Yella," "The State I Am In") as a world-class talent who remains underappreciated beyond Germany.

Jerichow forgoes the prolonged double-crosses of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," its simpler ending made all the more powerful--and a little heartbreaking.

The final twist is completely unexpected.

Petzold, who also wrote the script, doesn't make level one thrillers, and his characters may be smarter than us, or dumber. It's never just about the plot, anyway. It has to do with random accidents, dangerous coincidences, miscalculations, simple mistakes. And the motives are never simple.

It's a well-constructed and thoughtfully paced drama and almost a thriller, but in the end credibility and tension get lost in the mail.

Petzold, who has a crisp style and sharp sense of the visual, is too talented and imaginative to allow his film to become predictable. Rather, Jerichow offers implicit, sardonic social comment as well as a compelling playing out of the eternal triangle.

No one in Jerichow is entirely deserving of sympathy, which gives the film a detached, clinical feeling underlined by the director’s habit of observing emotions rather than evoking them.

Told in lean, tense cinematic gestures, Jerichow also captures a social portrait of newly multicultural Germany, at least as it extends into the country's forgotten rural interior.

So compact and controlled is this fine film.