Good

Flattery will get you everywhere; it even got the Nazis into power, or at least that’s how it appears in Good. It takes only a few words of praise to persuade Viggo Mortensen’ s fuddy duddy literature professor John Halder to write a propaganda piece based on his fictional novel about euthanasia. From there it’s only a hop, skip and a “Sieg Heil!” before he’s donning an SS uniform. Good presents itself as a morality tale but never answers the question of how a “good German” could go along with the Nazi agenda. It all seems so easy and perhaps that is the point but the readiness with which Halder capitulates isn’t believable. His distress at regime change and hatred of Hitler barely registers above a look of mild discomfort. Vicente Amorim’s direction is staid and the musical reveries of labourers and death-camp inmates only adds to the senslessness of a rather muddled film. [Marjorie Gallagher]