Transit

As a fascist occupation descends on France, refugees—including a German camp survivor who assumes a dead writer’s identity (Franz Rogowski) and the writer’s unwitting wife (Paula Beer)—gather in the sunlit purgatory of Marseille, seeking passage out of an increasingly dangerous Europe. It’s a classic scenario for a World War II thriller, but Christian Petzold’s Transit is no period piece: although the story comes from a 1944 novel, the clothes, cars, and architecture, plus the prominence of North Africans among the dispossessed, all place the action in France today. More than an it-could-happen-here allegory, the film is a visually lucid, deeply unsettling evocation of displacement—political, psychological, even existential.