The Reel Review
A Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz death camp encounters a group of revenge-minded Jewish vigilantes seeking to kill six million Germans in 1945 by poisoning the water supply of Germany’s largest cities. August Diehl and Sylvia Hoeks star in this 2021 period war drama based on a true story.
Nevermind that Jewish vigilante Abba Kovner’s massive, shocking plot never even came close to materializing – the film’s writer/directors, brothers Doran and Yoav Paz, so desperately try to weave a convoluted story out of nothing, that they even mislead the viewer before revealing it as a “what could have happened,” distracting from the film’s messages of justice, revenge and emotional healing.
Of the cast, Hoeks (Blade Runner 2049, The Girl in the Spider’s Web) delivers the most compelling performance as the mother-turned-vigilante, deeply traumatized by the wartime death of her young son. Diehl (A Hidden Life, Inglorious Basterds) is fine. Production wise, Plan A is solid enough, it just lacks a compelling story. A miss.
REEL FACTS
• Abba Kovner, the partisan mastermind behind the failed plot to poison the drinking water of six million Germans, in 1942 was the first Jew to call out the German plot to exterminate the Jews. Following a failed uprising, he fled to the Soviet Union and joined them in their war against the Nazis. In 1947 he immigrated to Palestine, which became Israel a year later. There, Kovner, a lifelong smoker, became one of the nation’s most praised Hebrew poets, dying in 1987 from laryngeal cancer at the age of 69.
• Born in the Netherlands in 1983, Sylvia Hoeks was discovered and became a model at the age of 14, before transitioning into a career as an actress in 2005. Hoeks speaks Dutch, English, German and French and lives in Los Angeles.
• Plan A was filmed in Germany, Israel and Ukraine, a couple of years prior to Russia’s invasion.
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