The film, about a Russian intelligence officer’s covert mission at the end of World War II, begins on a suspenseful note, but the tension soon dissipates.
“Burial” begins suspensefully enough. It opens in 1991 at the London home of a Russian Jewish woman, Anna (Harriet Walter), as she watches TV news of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s resignation as the Soviet president.
It’s quite the historic evening for a neo-Nazi (David Alexander) to break into Anna’s home. Fortunately, Anna gets the jump on him and cuffs him to a radiator. He thinks that Anna, while serving as a Russian officer at the end of World War II, covered up evidence that Hitler survived. She decides to tell him how wrong he is.
The movie, from the writer-director Ben Parker, flashes back to Berlin in 1945 — and the tension dissipates. We learn that the young Anna, who was known then as Brana (Charlotte Vega), was part of a covert mission to carry a conspicuously coffin-shaped crate to Moscow. Parker intends for viewers to speculate about its contents, but the trailer reveals what’s fairly obvious — that it’s Hitler’s remains. Stalin needs to look his enemy in the eye, we’re told, and Brana wants the world to see that Hitler was mortal and a coward.
The story is invented, and not particularly exciting as such. While die-hard German soldiers — armed, ridiculously, with hallucinogenic lichens — are eager to recapture the corpse and manufacture evidence that it’s a fake, the transport of a dead body is not exactly a “Wages of Fear” situation, and the murky nighttime visuals don’t help. Furthermore, the inconsistent linguistic choices — the Russian and German characters mostly stick to English, but the Poles sometimes speak Polish — only add to the muddle.
Burial
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
