This dramatisation of 1941 Czech resistance plot to assassinate SS general. Reinhard Heydrich, a prime mover behind the Final Solution, is both pleasingly redolent of a very old-fashioned war film, and yet its own picture.
Anthropoid opens with a familiar trope: two Czech soldiers, Jan Kubis (Jamie Dornan) and Josef Gabcik (Cillian Murphy), are parachuted into the woods outside Prague. A series of nervous encounters brings them into contact with the resistance, including local leader Uncle Jan (Toby Jones) and two young female operatives Marie (Charlotte Le Bon) and Lenka (Anna Geislerova), who pose as the soldiers' girlfriends.
Their mission is Operation Anthropoid: to kill the head of the Nazi forces in German- occupied Czechoslovakia.
From the get-go, the world- weary Josef is not expecting unqualified success: he berates his Jan when the latter upgrades his pretend girlfriend to actual girlfriend: “I have to believe there’s a normal life waiting for us,” Jan rejoinders poignantly. The two Irish actors make for a compelling screen duo.
Sepia rooms and hissed arguments punctuate this slow-burning drama until a final heart-pounding coda and a glimpse into an abhorrent aftermath. Following the actions depicted in the film, the Germans executed thousands of Czechs in retaliation, leaving the viewer to ponder, as others do in the film, if the entire operation was ill-advised.
That postscript is typical of director Sean Ellis’s carefully constructed script (co-written by Stanley Kubrick’s former assistant, Anthony Frewin), which insists against genre expectations that its heroes aren’t supermen and that the fog of war is tricky to negotiate, even with such obvious bad guys as the SS.
Anthropoid repeatedly stresses that those it depicts are ordinary men and women beset by extraordinary circumstances. They are, accordingly and rightly, fearful to the last. It's their terror that, paradoxically, underscores their courage.
Such moral quandaries won’t suit punters searching for high- octane pacing or blacks hats versus white hats. And to be fair, a few more scenes wherein somebody, somehow needs to distract that Nazi and quickly, would not have gone amiss. But this smart, grown-up drama is one of those films that seems happier to start a conversation, rather than having the last word.
