Scorched Earth (2024)

Original title: Verbrannte Erde

More than ten years after he had to flee the city following some business that went very badly indeed in In the Shadows, the first film of what is supposed to become a trilogy one day, armed robbery specialist Trojan (Mišel Matičević) returns to Berlin.

Looking for work from the few contacts he has left after his long absence, Trojan eventually manages to join the team of a properly planned, classic art heist. As is typically the case with a movie heist, stealing something and surviving the aftermath are very different things indeed, so Trojan has to cope with the vagaries of his business, particularly a client who’d rather not pay the thieves for the painting they stole for him.

This year, I’m apparently taking a deeper dive into the easily missable strands of proper genre filmmaking that developed in Germany in the last twenty-five years or so, typically hidden away in TV movies and films made by arthouse filmmakers.

It is somewhat curious that of all the German arthouse filmmaking movements of the last decades, it is the filmmakers of the Berlin School who have proven to be quite the genre filmmakers if they want to – if you’d only watch Arslan or Michael Petzold in their genre mode, you might start to believe we Germans are rather good at making this sort of thing.

In the Shadows. the first Trojan movie from 2010, crossed a clear love for Jean-Pierre Melville gangster movies in their most minimal mode of coolness with a sense of cold observation. That’s still a huge part of this rather belated sequel, but this time around, Arslan’s focussed – and pretty stylish – minimalism allows for a degree of warmth. Or rather, despite sparse/ultra-focussed (take your pick) characterisation, the director allows his characters to break professional coolness in a manner that suggests the humanity below it more clearly than he did in the earlier film.

Their coldness, the film appears to suggest, isn’t quite as natural as it appears, and rather an adaptation to their environment – Berlin. The city of this film is cold, empty, and never feels like a place actual people are meant to inhabit – it’s just streets and buildings empty of personality, often even devoid of the impression of habitability, and the only way one can find to survive in it is to stop being a person.

This does of course also fit nicely to some of the preoccupations of the kind of heist and gangster movie tradition Arslan’s film is part of: there’s not only the coolness and minimalism of Melville, but also the meticulousness of Mann, but without the latter’s slickness. As is often the case with characters like this, at least to me, there’s the shadow of Donald E. Westlake’s Parker hanging over Trojan and the films he appears in. With Parker, Trojan shares a calm ruthlessness that accepts acts of violence he deems necessary without compunction, his professionalism in a business that isn’t a proper business with proper professionals at all, the kind of trustworthiness that means he won’t stab you in the back unless you try and stab him first.

As a comparison, this is as high a compliment as you can pay to the protagonist of this kind of crime film, as well as the movie he’s in.