Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Thehibikiew Not even bad in a good way

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Karl Self This is a very strange movie. It starts with the text insert "Berlin, 1945", which translated to "the same place, but last year" at the time and place of filming. Although Berlin sure was in ruins at the time, everything seems so neat, cosy and tidy here -- it made me wish for those happy days of being bombed out and living hand-to-mouth. Susanne, the concentration camp survivor, is perfectly made up and groomed in every scene. When she returns from the camps and finds the alcoholic misanthrope Dr Mertens squatting in her flat, she naturally falls heels over head in love with him. Dr Mertens has the fetching characteristic of never having to worry about food or fuel, and being able to party every day in nightclubs despite being pennyless. Strangely, most films that came years later managed to paint a more realistic picture of the post-war chaos than the film that was filmed right in the thick of it. There is also a somewhat overwrought old man, Mondschein, waiting for the return of his son from the war.The movie finally gains momentum when Mertens encounters his former commander, Ferdinand Brückner, who on Christmas eve only a few years ago ordered the execution of a hundred civilians. Brückner is an unscrupulous, jolly bastard, who has always managed to stay on top and is now already a successful entrepreneur. Compared to the other rather ethereal characters of the story, he is truly creepy because he is realistic, remorseless -- and strangely likable. In the original plot, Mertens eventually avenges himself and murders Brückner, but in order not to promote lynch justice, the movie takes a more moderate and open ending.The movie is very courageous in that it doesn't aim to entertain or send out a positive vibe, but confronts the uncomfortable past head-on and dares to hold up a mirror at its audience, in a way that few, if any, movies have done since. For that, and for its historic value, it deserves twenty out of ten points. Sadly it lacks a bit in suspense. On a side note, its brilliant cinematography and especially the masterly use of shadows was reciprocated in another classic that was filmed two years later, with almost an overload of suspense: The Third Man.

mjb0123 Unit 5 film discussion Matt Butcher The Murderers Are Among Us is a film made immediately after World War II in East Germany. The melancholy of the film is derived from its main characters, a female concentration camp survivor who returns to her old apartment to find it occupied by an ex-military doctor. This military doctor drives the main conflict of the film in that his conscience is slowly eating away at him for his apparent actions during the war.In this regard, the film acts as a conscience for the people of East Germany, slowly asking themselves about their past and how they are going to live with it. It was a tumultuous period of reconciliation that the Germans were trying to live through. This movie tries to act on those feelings.Silberman notes that another film of this time, Rotation, "constructs a narration based on identification and emotional catharsis rather than on the cognitive terms of epic distanciation." The Murderers Are Among Us also tries to wipe the slate clean. It comes out and admits that what happened was wrong, hence the horrible feelings that the doctor is going through. They cannot completely distance themselves from these previous events, these earth-shattering events, unless they work through these feelings.

peterpolaroid Having just seen this movie for the first time, I'll agree with some of the other comments.The acting seems theatrical, at times almost political. The movie would make a great double with "The Third Man".What struck me was the significance of this movie. That the Soviets are the ones that made it possible. That forgiveness (and legal justice) not revenge were the goals to move past the horrors of life, a message only brought about by the Soviets changing the ending. Not having known the history of this movie, I wondered about the soviet involvement, when in one street scene children were playing within a stones throw of a wrecked soviet tank. (Or was it wrecked?).It was made in 1946. I can only imagine the hardship for everyone overrun by the wars destructive path. This movie plainly shows that life does continue.

theorbys Murderers Among Us is the first film made, of a vast trove of films, in the Soviet controlled sector of post-war Germany that was to become East Germany. It is deeply and masterfully immersed in the aesthetic traditions of German Expressionism and /or Film Noir: unusual angles and picture planes, extreme lighting effects, twisted stairs, bombed-out buildings that look like jagged fingers against the sky (it was shot in the ruins of Berlin), a haunted, tormented protagonist, stark black and white atmosphere, and, above all, shadows. Shadows and more shadows of every size, shape, and density. In fact this film could serve as a text book on shadow craft: the scene where a man is screaming from within the vast shadow of a pistol wielding attacker is magnificent. I haven't seen The Third Man recently but I am sure Murderers influenced it profoundly. I would recommend the Third Man as a good double feature with this film.Murders belongs to a genre called 'rubble films', shot in the rubble of Germany and frequently dealing with issues of German guilt after WW II. Murderers does not seek to deal overmuch with the people who gave the orders, but with the many Germans who followed them with little or no protest. Such as the wounded doctor in this film who stood by while even children were executed as reprisals against resistance fighters in occupied Poland. Plotwise the film works quite nicely, and I liked the atmosphere of renewal, and perhaps relief at the end of a nightmare, amongst all that ruin and rubble as the German people began to pick themselves up.