14 years after the first part, Thomas Arslan continues his gangster trilogy. Scorched Earth screened at the 2024 Berlinale and is already one of the best German films of the year.
Anyone who wants to experience a guided tour of Berlin’s soulless architectural sins this summer should be inspired by Burnt Earth. But the gallery of parking lots, aseptic hotel corridors and industrial wastelands is not the only reason to let the heist film cool you down in July.
Thomas Arslan’s late sequel to the minimalist In the Shadows keeps you entertained with ingenious heists, car chases and a taciturn underworld crew.
The heist thriller impresses with its sober style
2010 was the last time we saw him, the professional criminal Trojan (Misel Maticevic from Babylon Berlin). Back then, he fled into the darkness after a confrontation with a drug-dealing cop and a killer duo. Years later, he returns to Berlin. Trojan needs money and gets involved in the theft of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
Together with computer expert Chris (Bilge Bingül), getaway driver Diana (Marie Leuenberger) and his old friend Luca (Tim Seyfi), he methodically plans the coup. Can they trust the mysterious client and his henchman Victor (Alexander Fehling)?
Anyone who has seen a handful of gangster and crime films in their life will know the answer. The script of Scorched Earth is a string of set pieces from the genre: the criminal who returns to his old stomping ground after a long time, the team of contrasting characters, and backers who don’t stick to their agreements.
(Misel Maticevic in Scorched Earth)
In the Shadows was characterized less by the originality of the story than by its economical style. Crime and violence were captured with extreme sobriety, which made the everyday life of the professional criminal seem all the more lonely. Scorched Earth follows on seamlessly from this atmosphere. As if Trojan had never been away and yet everything had changed
Alexander Fehling amuses as the pithy villain
Few things in German cinema feel so at home and alienating at the same time as the sight of Misel Maticevic sipping a coffee in a bakery and spying on a pedestrian mall.
The taciturn professional Trojan sneaks through a world of double-crosses and false promises. Alexander Fehling’s Victor emerges as his antagonist in Scorched Earth. Fehling plays the mucker with exhibited malice, puffed up, far too cool and quite amusing.
The hard-boiled character miniatures like Victor or test driver Diana enliven the vision of the underworld in Scorched Earth. Gone is the sense of a milieu, of betting shops and dark back alleys. 12 years after Im Schatten, what remains of Berlin crime is a gentrified market that is subject to the greed and arbitrariness of the rich.
(Alexander Fehling in Verbrannte Erde)
It’s a bleak portrait of the underworld that is drawn in Scorched Earth, quite akin to David Fincher’s Freelancer nightmare The Killer, via a detour to Jean-Pierre Melville and Don Siegel. You can’t trust anyone, there are no codes of honor and in the end there’s always a bigger fish waiting for its prey.
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But this movie can in no way be described as gloomy. The robberies are too precisely and elegantly orchestrated for that, and the script’s feints, twists and tricks are too much fun
