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Shira Haas plays one of the Jewish girls in hiding, doing so with such conviction that she’s a stand-out in the ensemble. In an effort to help save the lives of Polish Jews, Jan Zabinski begins smuggling them out of the ghettos in a guise of collecting garbage. A complex and charmingly sickening character, Heck develops an attraction to Antonina, and his persistent advancement on her is an unsettling, impeccably developed arc. After the Warsaw Zoo is bombed and overrun with German troops, Daniel Brühl enters as the villain, Lutz Heck, a Nazi zoologist who is put in charge after Germany’s invasion. In fact, the film’s entire cast holds its own. While credit is, of course, due to writer Angela Workman, Chastain draws us into the narrative with a soft yet commanding performance that is among her finest. It is Antonina’s gentle interactions with the dozens of zoo animals that make the gun shots that much louder and the Nazi regime that much more monstrous. She is a true caretaker in every sense of the word, and the juxtaposition of Antonina Zabinski’s kindness with the terrors of the Holocaust render this story all the more magnetic. Antonina begins her days snuggling with lion cubs, bicycling around the zoo beside a young camel, and forming friendships with full-sized elephants. From the opening scene, Chastain’s performance mesmerizes, inserting an undeniable beauty and lightness into a story that is otherwise fraught with horrendous tragedy. The film opens in 1939 Warsaw, where Jan Zabinski ( Johan Heldenbergh) and his wife, Antonina Zabinski ( Jessica Chastain), operate the Warsaw Zoo. The narrative is a simple one, allowing The Zookeeper’s Wife to shine in its performances, imagery, and storytelling, which it pristinely accomplishes.
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Niki Caro‘s drama follows a couple who hide Jews in their zoo and use it as a point of passage and escape during the Nazi takeover of Warsaw. The Zookeeper’s Wife begins with those five famous words that hold the power to either become a film’s dependency (and therefore downfall) or its empowering catalyst, laying the foundation to convey a poignant tale: “Based on a true story.” Fortunately, The Zookeeper’s Wife sticks with the latter, and the true tale being told is one for the ages.