The Zookeeper’s Wife **** (2017, Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Brühl) -Movie Review

Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh star as the married couple Antonina and Jan Zabinski, keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, who helped save 300 people during the German invasion of Poland.

Daniel Brühl plays the leading Nazi, Lutz Heck, a zoologist who offers to save their best animals by shipping them to his Berlin zoo, and then gets involved in a relationship with Antonina.

This is a good true story of courage and concern, honourably and well told, with three excellent star performances, subtle, understated and compelling, drawing you in to follow their fates. Angela Workman’s script (based on Diane Ackerman’s non-fiction book) has its problems, but not too many, possibly glossing over situations and facts in its intention to tell the story in an upbeat, uplifting way.

Appalling things happen – it’s a Holocaust movie – but the film-makers want to put an uplifting, positive shine on things. Antonina and Jan did a wonderful thing, or series of things, and it is right to celebrate them, and in this positive light.

Maybe director Niki Caro’s film should have a darker tone, but the makers want to see the light in the darkness and think there’s probably no point in dwelling yet again on the details of the sickness of the Holocaust. It makes its important points simply and clearly anyway.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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