RESISTANCE reviewed

Amit Gupta's Resistance, based on Owen Sheer's novel, looks at the ambiguities resulting from the very thin line separating our impulse to survive and collaborating with the enemy to do so, as a German platoon takes over a desolate and distant Welsh valley, during World War 2, after the failure of the Allied invasion of Normandy in D Day.

The Germans find all the men had left the valley, so they are on edge, yet they slowly start to uneasily befriend the women, who were left behind. In particular, Albrecht (Tom Wlaschiha), the captain, falls for Sarah (Andrea Riseborough), a relationship established between them all the time on a knife edge. Sarah feels incapable to resist the overtures of Albrecht, particularly due to the help given to the women by the Germans to run the farms in the middle of a severe winter, but her devotion to her husband, who is supposed to be in the mountains with the other men from the valley fighting the Germans, and her country, led her to play a double game: on one hand, befriending the captain, on the other, planning her escape.

Soon news about the captured, tortured, and shot men from the valley start to filter to the valley, while the captain tries to keep his men alive until the nearing end of the war.

While I thought that the uneasy relationship between the invading Germans and the women is handled quite sensitively, I found the whole premise of the film unbelievable. A failure of D Day would had not led to a German invasion of Britain, it would had only delayed the end of the war for some time. Allied forces were already advancing from Italy, while the Russian were doing the same from the East, the German army was already weak in terms of men and resources, Germany, the country, was already economically ruined.

Cinematically, I found the constant use of flashbacks to the Russian campaign to be distracting, at best, and completely useless at worst, as a background of contained violence had already been established by some much more effective shots of random executions in the valley.

Resistance DVD and Blu Ray is already on sale in Britain, courtesy of Metrodome Distribution.

Starring Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen

D-Day has failed and Britain is under Nazi occupation. Following on from its acclaimed cinema release, RESISTANCE comes to DVD and Blu Ray in March.

Sarah Lewis (Andrea Riseborough), a 26-year-old farmer’s wife, awakes one morning to find that her husband has disappeared along with all the men in the valley. Assuming they have joined the Resistance, the women of this tiny community pull together, taking on the running of the farms, and wait, desperate for news. A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of its mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups into co-operation, Sarah begins an acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht (Tom Wlaschiha). Cut off from the surrounding war, the lines between collaboration, duty, occupation and survival become blurred.

Based on the critically acclaimed novel by Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE features sensational lead performances from British rising star Andrea Riseborough (Brighton Rock, Made In Dagenham) and Tom Wlaschiha (Enemy At The Gates, Valkyrie, Brideshead Revisited), and co-stars Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, The Damned United).

Trailer © Metrodome Distribution