The Ninth Day is such a banal, unprovoking look at faith under Nazi oppression that it comes as a shock that this is a work by veteran German director Volker Schlöndorff. The dramatic idea—a cross between Costa-Gavras’ Amen which told of a German officer attempting to inform the Catholic Church about Nazi atrocities, and Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc which depicted the transcendence of a human ardently keeping to her faith under pressure—is that an influential priest from Luxembourg (Ulrich Matthes) is temporarily released from the Dachau concentration camp in order to be blackmailed into writing a letter of support for the Nazi regime. The priest’s doppelganger is a young Christian Gestapo man (August Diehl) who threatens the imprisonment of the priest’s family and the execution of all of Luxembourg’s clergy if the priest tries to flee, and re-imprisonment in Dachau if he will not form a bridge between the Vatican and the Reich.

For a two-character chamber drama the drama is seriously lacking. Schlöndorff’s only formal steps taken to portray the priest’s crisis of conscious and faith is deadening the color of Luxembourg so that it resembles not a relief from the camps but a grim tomb bereft of life. This aesthetic decision sadly also kills off the outside world, making it seem like the uncomfortable political limbo of Luxembourg during the war exists only as a test for the priest, a purgatory in-between pre-war, faith-filled life and the horrors of Dachau. Barely anyone not involved in tormenting the priest is absent from the screen, as if the rest of the society were hushed behind closed doors waiting for the result of the singular struggle. Leaving the drama up to the actors would be permitted if the script, written by Eberhard Görner and Andreas Pflüger from the real-life diary of the priest, was as sharp and combative in words as, for example, Dreyer’s film is in visuals. Instead, Schlöndorff lets the aesthetics of the actors speak for the film in its entirely. At first this seems not like a bad decision, as Matthes’ visage seems gaunt and haunted in a way suggesting not only that Dachau has physically withered his features but that this is a man with such a perceptive moral sense that everything around him seems to weigh on his psyche as a crisis of faith, and the strain visibly has altered his face. The superficial, but never the less extremely interesting intertextual point that Matthes had most recently played Dr. Joseph Goebbles in Downfall ironically brings a unique tension into a film that is supremely lacking in its depiction of a personal crisis. Diehl is not so lucky, playing the plucky, young, intellectual Nazi so common to cinema, and the fact that neither actor really is able to take a bite out of the other (as each character seems to have something else on their mind, the script doesn’t truly evoke what and Schlöndorff does not offer any subtly of psychology) is a failure of the script and the direction, not of the situation.

Taking place in such a real setting—as opposed to the abstract historical setting of Passion of Joan of Arc—it seems like above all else the priest’s moral conflict should be an allegory for all collaborators and potential collaborators, who have to individually weigh the worth of what they want to protect with the grander things they believe in and stand for(be it religion, national, or social). The Ninth Day never offers such an allegory; its ambitions are humble but this humbleness, when compounded by the film’s dramatic timidity and pathetic use of conventional filmmaking, make the ambitions of the film not just humble but low and cowardly.