User Reviews

"Schachnovelle" is one of the defining German 2021 movies and the international title is "The Royal Game". This one basically excludes the book element because the German title also includes the form of the book this film is based on. A bit difficult to explain. Just like "Dreigroschenoper" includes "Oper". Anyway, we read the book at school, the one this is based on and I remember it was one of not too many books that I liked, maybe because I have liked chess for a long time as well, already as a child or maybe also because of other reasons. So I was a bit curious about this film and I wonder if it is a coincidence that it came out now not too long after a certain chess-based series in America made massive waves and received a gigantic amount of praise. Anyway, this movie here runs for 110 minutes and the director is Bavarian Philipp Stölzl, perhaps one of the most successful German filmmakers these days and I remember really liking his The Physician from a few years ago. So the premise, not only in terms of the book, this film is based on looked promising. And I was surely not disappointed here. But I will get to that later. One reason for the success is surely writer Eldar Grigorian and with him I am a bit surprised that he was in charge here. His body of work before this film and also his focus on direction did not make it obvious that he would be picked to pen such a huge project. However, luckily he did really well and I enjoyed the outcome quite a bit here. Also thanks to him.

Then there is the cast of course. You see the people on the poster here on imdb. The big head on the right belongs to Oliver Masucci. The cast list here on imdb is a bit confusing because it is alphabetical and not ordered by significance or screen time. He is the one and only lead in this film of course and in almost every scene from beginning to end. He has surely turned into one of Germany's most successful actors by now, especially if we are looking at domestic movies, even if from what I have seen he has also been in international television projects lately. His take as a certain someone who is back again a few years ago was a bit of his breakthrough as a lead actor and since then he has scored one interesting lead role after the next. He also won the German Film Award this year for his portrayal of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, even if he could have been nominated for this film we have here as well. He was nominated (and won) for both films at the Bavarian Film Awards I see. Also nominated for a German Film Award in the supporting category was Birgit Minichmayr. She is a bit of the epitome of the (relatively) young German supporting actress since her turn in Der Untergang. You don't see her play lead characters like she did in "Alle Anderen". I am not sure her performance here was really nomination-worthy though. I mean she was good and everything (and her voice was nice indeed) and a revelation about her character is pretty memorable, but the performance alone did not leave a huge impact on me. The main antagonist you also see on the poster. That is the character played by Albrecht Schuch. He managed the rare feat not too long ago to win both German Film Awards for male actors in one year and he played the antagonist in Berlin Alexanderplatz and plays a totally different antagonist in this film here. Even if both are ruthless and evil you can say. Then again, the films are set during completely different eras, so no surprise the characters differ a lot as well. There are other familiar faces here like Finzi (who I don't like too much), Lassgård (who I liked more) and Andreas Lust. The latter I always like, even if he was nothing but a violent brute this time and his thick Austrian accent was also impossible to understand.

Oh as I just mentioned Berlin Alexanderplatz I can also say that this film here is not a modern take on an old book, but really they stayed with the story and settings from back then. The good news is that the result is also technically a pretty good movie. This refers to all kinds or production values, no matter if we are talking costumes (the only German Film Award it won, pretty early during the ceremony, so I thought there would be more to come, but nope), sets, cinematography or make-up. Very nicely done. Also the physical transformation from Masucci's character was pretty devastating and added a lot to the depressing tone this movie delivered almost from beginning to end. It's tough to really find anything wrong with it. Honestly, at the start, I thought that it was not entirely realistic that he randomly runs into Minichmayr's character when entering the ship, but later on we find out she was never really there. Only in his imagination. She stood for his hope. We don't know what happened to her and if she is real at the very end or if he has been crazy from the very start or if it is just a consequence there of all that happened earlier when we see him in the insane asylum with the others eventually. As for the very best moments, surely the first encounter between the protagonist and the chess champion comes to mind and how the former presents his idea of not losing at least. The player there, the ship's captain I think, was initially overwhelmed too and did not take him seriously at all, but after the protagonist mentions a few names of old chess champions from the 1920s, he becomes curious and afterwards is overwhelmed. Oh yeah, said captain's change of mind from how he really wants Masucci's character to play to how he says that he should stop because otherwise he could lose more than a game of chess felt a bit abrupt to me. But I have to dig very deep here for inclusions that I did not like.

Here and there, I was even tempted to give the overall outcome 4 stars out of 5 and not just 3. But the (almost) final scene with how he really sees everybody there in his illusion with the antagonist (looking like the chess champion), his secretary, the violent Austrian, his own maid, his executed friend, his wife (I think they were married) etc. Was a bit much. It was probably like this in the book, but still. At least I did not like the way too much how it was presented here then. Really just a minor issue. The good moments are much more frequent. Take the scene in which the main antagonist finds the chess book and and also the chess pieces immediately afterwards and how he breaks one of those. You could really feel Masucci's character's pain there. They were all he had. Also his begging that the guy should not take the book from him was heartbreaking. The villain sees right through this and how this book (and the pieces) basically destroyed his plan to break the man completely to get the information he wants. He was a smart man. Here and there I felt a bit with Schuch as if I was watching Waltz in the Tarantino movie (IB) with the way he acted and the approach he gave the character. Especially the poof scene comes to mind. There, however, it was as much about Masucci how he fired back by saying he wants back to his room. It can be a prison, even if it is a nice room when there is no contact with other humans for such a long time. It was a year as we find out in the end. The protagonist has to go through other forms of torture too. Take the violence from Lust's character. Take the scene with his friend, who is shot in the head right in front of him. The Emperor of China reference there I did not totally get. There is a lot more to write about. I personally cannot really compare the book this is based on with the screenplay/movie now because it has been almost 20 years I think since I read the book, but the film is good enough. I could say "enjoyable", but that is probably the wrong word in this context. It is highly depressing and not only during scenes like those when he tries to cut his wrists and commit suicide. Slightly contradictory though because briefly before that he said that it is his knowledge (the codes) that keeps them from killing him and apparently he really wants to live.

Also look at the beginning and how the main character really does not take the situation seriously at all and thinks it will be over soon. Frequently with films, I am not too happy about intermittent flashbacks or actually flashforwards because it's not always easy to understand where/when we are right now, but here it was pretty easy to grasp, so they did well from this perspective too. It's not about the (missing) moustache, but all about the location probably. The ship was always easy to identify and so was the hotel, except maybe when he was alone in a room like when he locked himself in for a moment, but got help immediately. At the end, it also felt a bit quick and out of nowhere when he is let go and walking out of the hotel, which makes it more difficult to understand what was really going on and what was going on just in his head. They also told us early on who the hotel belonged to initially. That the Nazis stole it basically. This moment of freedom when he walks out was also pretty good, but still not as great as they intended it to be I would say. Alright, there are quite a few more scenes one could elaborate on, but I shall leave it at that now I think. This is a film you certainly wanna see. 7 out of 10 might be more accurate. Some great scenes and overall a good movie. It's also nice to see they can still turn such old books into great quality. Some great scenes (most of them devastating), overall a pretty good movie led by one or two (if we count Schuch) strong performances and if anybody doubts Masucci's talent, then there is no way he still will after seeing the outcome here. Don't think any other actor could have lifted the material to higher quality. He always reminds me a bit of Tobias Moretti, just a bit younger. "Schachnovelle" clearly gets a thumbs-up and there is certainly way more to discover here and many other interesting scenes that I did not reference in my review.

What a great film adaptation of this Stefan Zweig book. The story was psychologically intelligently realized in a rousing way.

And ... how good can you be? Oliver Masucci is fantastic. Incredibly unbelievably good!!!

But I was also impressed by the other performers.

Some scenes (like his crying when he understood that it was a unmeaning chess book after that its 64 squares chess board in the bath) made me want to read the book again because the scenes have showed me that I could imagine these scenes better in my mind while reading.

In the end, the game moments, transformation of chatacters hit(v2) me so deep and following it was excited.

The only thing I said It could be better in this piece of art, we should have seen Czentovic's character more.

This was an excellent movie, that grabbed me from the beginning to the end. Real violence was more in my own imagination, than actually shown, although it was also there. But physical violence was not the point of this movie and the novel from Stefan Zweig, which I also enjoyed as a teenager. Stefan Zweig, an Austrian from Vienna himself, was a huge admirer of contemporary German intellectuals, such as Thomas Mann, which was echoed by the German, and can still be read in their frequent exchange of letters. Both came from families of writers and bohemians and although I always loved Stefan Zweig (his 'Sternstunden der Menschheit' is one of the most beautiful books ever written), Mann is towering them all even today and one of Mann's books is thrown into the fire bin in this movie. Both were outspoken anti-Nazis and forced to finally leave their home countries. In the Schachnovelle, Zweig imagines a kind of intellectual torture, that only highly educated men could do to one another. After the socalled 'Anschluss' of Austria, the invading Germans decide to go after jewish properties and the notary Bartok is in charge of those. But he is not willing to tell them the passcodes of Swiss bankaccounts, so they pressure him, until he does. And to get to a cultural person like him, who is able to recite homer and more, they starve him intellectually, by taking away any book or other occupation in solitary confinement. No windows, little light, no speaking to other people - just always the same song ('Ich wollt ich waer ein Huhn - I wish I was a chicken') over and over. We never know, if he did tell them, or not. But in the end, when he gets away, he is not himself anymore and I cried when it became clear later on, that he had only imagined his beloved wife to be with him (whom he had successfully sent away to Rotterdam, before the Nazis grabbed him). A beautiful mind had been destroyed. What this has to do with chess? In a drastic way, you realize, that intense occupation with the game can indeed drive you into insanity. You wanted to learn something about chess? This movie is not for you. I am sure Stefan Zweig was a lover of chess, just as myself. And in his novel, he anticipated somebody like Bobby Fischer, just around the time, when Fischer was born (1941 vs. 1943). But is it really necessary to leave a bad review, just because you do not learn anything about the game? What a performance from Oliver Masucci this was. I was speechless. Now, I am only asking myself: How is it possible, that I did not see the movie earlier? Why did it not get more attention at the time?

Even if I got angry because it's different from the book at the beginning of the movie, I got used to it and also liked that. Watching Dr. B.'s increasing madness while he was suffering from the Nazis and seeing that when he was "free," he didn't return to his old state (as if the only pain he was suffering from wasn't his chess addiction) was amazing. In the book, it seems like he hasn't suffered from anything except his chess addiction and loneliness.

Moreover, Oliver Masucci has incredible acting skills, which provide a better understanding of Dr. B.'s psychology.

Overall, even though I didn't like some of the details, I really enjoyed the movie, and the acting is one of the reasons for it.

This stellar war time drama, by a great director, is definitely deserving of all the anticipation I had for it.

The performances really carry this film, and the cast all do an incredible job, as one would expect from such a stellar and legendary set of actors. All of this accompined by an incredible, unconventional in ways, and stellar script by a true auteur.

The cinematography, cutting and editing is great, and it is all around very beautifully put together, very beautifully shot.

Overall, truly an incredible drama, high om emotions, made in a very masterful, unique and unconventional style, and highly recommended for any lover of film! One of the best films of the year for sure.