Ink of Blood

(This review may contain spoilers).

I haven’t actually read the book that this film is based on, so I’m afraid I don’t know how true the film is to the original media.

Germany during the Second World War is a place and time that I’ve seen revisited often, in both film and literature. Just on that alone, the plot of this isn’t really unique, but the way it’s handled is.

The asides from Death during the film were pretty interesting. It’s probably hard to establish a character just through voice alone in a film, but I felt that the voice actor did a particularly good job of that.

The strongest part of this was, I felt, the relationships that Liesel formed with the other characters. I especially liked her friendship and possibly more with Rudy. There were a lot of sweet moments involving them in the film.

I also liked the books aspect. Being an avid reader, I cringed at the sight of all of those books being burned – and I thought it was really good where Liesel was learning to read.

One specific nitpick I had – and I’ve noticed this used a lot in different things – was the random inserts of German speech. Since this film is set in Germany, I would assume that they were, in fact, speaking German – and therefore, it’s unnecessary for random words to be spoken in German.

I felt that the actors did a really good job in this. The variety of attitudes towards the war and Hitler came across really well, too.

The ending did make me sad and I think there was much more of the story that could have been told. This film did make me really want to read the book, though.