To describe Lior Geller's THE WORLD WILL TREMBLE as a rough watch seems an understatement.
This tells the story of two Jewish prisoners, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen & Jeremy Neumark Jones, who escape a Polish Nazi death camp and end up providing the world's first eyewitness account of the Holocaust.
And god, what an account. This movie's less than two hours and for half of it, we're in the camp with these men, watching every indecency stack on top of each other. Humiliation, torture, extortion, you name it. Prisoners are forced to bear witness to the extermination of fellow Jews, walking in forced silence, listening to the shrieks of men, women and children rattle their skulls (and by proxy, us at home) like a hurricane howling against windows. They bury their brethren in mass graves, shoveling lime on top of the bodies to hide the stench.
This isn't spearheaded by the Nazis of Auschwitz or Dachau. This precedes the Final Solution. Watching these monsters fumble their way through genocide exposes the severity of their cruelty. They don't know how to efficiently kill, but by Satan's hand, they're determined.
And it's against this backdrop that these two escapees sprint and swim and drive their way to the closest town to get this message out to a local rabbi. Less than 30 minutes away from civilization, unspeakable atrocities are being committed; this might as well be taking place on a separate planet, the whiplash is so fierce.
Geller's movie serves as a devastatingly beautiful warning to the rest of us, living in times of ICE raids and political disappearances. If left unchecked, this can and will be us. Act accordingly.
THE WORLD WILL TREMBLE premieres in select theaters nationwide (including the Angelika in Dallas) on March 14.
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