Supernatural Nazi Double-Bill: The Keep & Overlord

The Keep is quite unlike any other film Michael Mann’s ever directed, which is probably why it remains so intensely fascinating. The story follows a garrison of German soldiers - led by Jurgen Prochnow - dispatched to a Romanian village near the Carpathian mountains, which includes a mysterious citadel known simply as “the keep.” When the Nazis inadvertently unleash an ancient entity confined within - and start dying one-by-one - a ruthless SS officer (Gabriel Byrne) is tasked with restoring order (Byrne’s Major Kaempffer to Ian McKellen’s Jewish folklore professor, in one of the more cold-blooded lines you’ll ever hear a Nazi utter on-screen - “The people that go to these ‘assessment camps’… there are only two doors, one in and one out. And the one out is a chimney”).

If we’re being ruthlessly honest, The Keep would probably be best filed under the category of “well-intentioned misfires.” Mann was infamously forced to hack his original three-and-a-half hour cut into a severely truncated 96-minute version that frequently flirts with narrative incoherence. Original DP Alex Thomson wasn’t available for reshoots, which gives the film a visually uneven look. The lackluster special effects can be attributed to the untimely death of visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers two weeks into post-production. Many of Mann’s more ambitious visual concepts and set pieces were scrapped or drastically scaled back. To say the end product is a compromised vision would be an understatement.​

And yet… the film has a dreamlike intensity (heightened, as so many films of the 80s were, by its Tangerine Dream score) that’s utterly unlike Mann’s more carefully calibrated urban thrillers. Slow-motion shots of Nazi soldiers running through the eerie, mist-shrouded corridors of the keep lodge themselves in the subconscious. The narrative soufflé never quite rises, but the ingredients (including Scott Glenn as an angelic warrior drawn by the entity’s growing power) have a ripe, almost Wagnerian potential to them. For obvious reasons, the Nazis have long served as cinematic shorthand for on-screen villainy, so it’s striking to see them rendered insignificant against a cosmic backdrop of good vs evil. Even more boldly, McKellen’s Dr. Theodore Cuza initially believes he’s acting as a savior to his people, only to realize he may be unleashing an even greater darkness on the world - far from the typical tenor of a story with direct ties to the Holocaust. The Keep is messy and imperfect, but there’s a reason its cult legacy has endured - like its titular structure, there’s a certain power thrumming deep in its walls.

Overlord is packaged like cinematic orange juice - extra pulp. The JJ Abrams-produced film, like so many World War II action pics that came before, hinges on a desperate, against-the-odds mission - a squadron of paratroopers, deposited behind enemy lines and tasked with destroying a German radio-jamming tower as part of the larger D-Day offensive. But the transport plane is shot down (glance at your phone and you might miss a cameo by Joseph Quinn of Stranger Things fame) and, in the blink of an eye, the squadron is reduced to little more than a quartet - including Boyce (Jovan Adepo), a Black soldier whose stomach for combat is in question; Corporal-in-command Ford (Wyatt Russell); and Tibbet (John Magaro), the sort of loud-mouthed Brooklynite who almost feels like a prerequisite in stories like these. ​

It doesn’t take long for the Americans to cotton on to the fact that the Nazis are up to something far more sinister in the local church they’ve requisitioned as their base of operations. “A thousand year army… needs thousand year soldiers,” hints SS baddie Captain Wafner (Pilou Asbaek)… not that it’s terribly difficult to suss out what’s happening in their secret labs. Director Julius Avery keeps the story’s B-movie machinery humming fluidly, though you might find yourself wishing the plot had an additional gear or two… as it might very well have in the hands of a filmmaker like Guillermo Del Toro (or even Stuart Gordon)… or that it was willing to go truly bonkers in the third act. But even so, there’s a muscular quality to the horror here, and the film is well-served by its low-key cast (Adepo has a soft, soulful quality, and while nepotism can be a double-edged sword, Russell shows a star quality that’s slightly flintier than his father’s). More than anything, Overlord is a reminder of why seeing Nazis dabble in the occult and fringe science remains such a tantalizing proposition - it’s an irresistible nexus of history and fantasy, of imagination and nightmare, of real and make-believe monsters.