Werner Herzog's Invincible tells the story of a Polish blacksmith in Nazi Germany who in his provincial integrity thinks he can protect his people after becoming the star at the Palace of the Occult in Berlin, which is overseen by a sinister man who dreams of becoming the Nazis' Minister of the Occult. Much of the movie's uncanny appeal comes from the contrast between the simple-mindedly innocent blacksmith-come-strongman and Tim Roth's wicked Hanussen, who trickles with studied malice. Standing between them is a young woman under Hanussen's mental force, who the strongman loves. The movie is supposedly based on a true story. I can conceive of various ways it could've been told unspectacularly, but Herzog has turned it into a movie in which we mostly have no clue what could possibly happen next.
The movie has the evocativeness of a German silent film, bold in its expressionism and moralistic insistence. Its casting is critical, and intuitively right. Tim Roth is a menacing deceiver, posing as a man with extrasensory abilities, using hocus-pocus and theatrics as he hustles for position within the rising Nazi majority. There's a scene where he hypnotizes the strongman's love interest, and as he stares dauntlessly toward us, I wondered if it was feasible to hypnotize us as well. As for the untrained actor playing the strongman, the camera can look as closely as you like and never see anything insincere.
Herzog always works to push us into the mythic and the mysterious. And here, there are shots of a stark, craggy seashore where the stones are covered with thousands of bright red crabs, all clambering away on their crustaceous errands. As with similar imagery in most of Herzog's other films, there can be no exact interpretation of this. And like most of his other films, Invincible is a unique experience. Herzog has gotten outside the tropes and confines of conventional movie storytelling, and confronts us where our sense of trust and belief keeps its skeletons.
