“Franz Rogowski drifts into Christian Petzold’s Transit like the ghost of a man. As Georg, a desperate refugee posing as a writer to gain Mexican asylum and escape an occupied and increasingly hellish Europe, Rogowski first appears visibly emptied of feeling. Georg is a scarred witness to the atrocities of life during wartime, an enigma defined only by a drive to survive. His clammy body is shifty in its motions, as though not wishing to be noticed; his eyes are vacant, save for the troubled look that emanates in an early, pivotal moment of fight-or-flight calculation. Rogowski serves as the steady center of Petzold’s dystopian drama, and his revelatory performance is a carefully calibrated crescendo in which this blank canvas accrues new marks of affection, wistfulness, and guilt, becoming an ever more layered creation in the process. The actor has been endowed with an unconventionally beautiful face as distinctive and demonstrative as Al Pacino’s, but one that can be easily restricted of its full expressive power depending on who is standing behind the camera. We have seen the brooding hardness in Rogowski’s features before, but Petzold is one of the first directors to showcase its kindness, pleasing not in spite of its bruises but because of them. Petzold’s camera basks in the softness of Rogowski’s emoting visage as Georg lies in the arms of a newfound love or loses himself in the recital of a remembered lullaby from his youth, our dawning recognition of the actor’s capabilities paralleled by our gradual understanding of the character as Georg emerges from his self-preserving state of detachment. It is only fitting that Petzold ends his film with a devastating close-up of Rogowski lit from within by a foolish and impossible hope, his face a worn map eager to be discovered and read by an audience already attuned to its every microscopic movement.” — Matthew Eng
