Burial (2022)

TOPICS:

Posted By: brian@brianschell.com March 9, 2023

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

This was a werewolf movie on Shudder. Oops. Someone misunderstood somewhere, and this is actually a war movie thriller. The werewolves were a kind of German fighter during world war 2. Still, it was a pretty good war movie and a decent action movie.

Synopsis

London, 1991. Gorbachev has resigned as President of the Soviet Union. Anna Marshall watches the news while her little dog barks outside. She lets him inside, and we see that there’s someone out there… someone in a mask who lets themselves in. The lady sees the guy and Tases him. He wakes up cuffed to the radiator, and he’s not happy.

She asks him why he broke into her house; he’s a skinhead and she’s a Jew, so that might be the reason. “I know who you are,” he says. She’s seen his ID, so she knows him now too. “I know you were a Soviet translator. I know what you found in Berlin,” he says. He says there’s a story from the end of the war. A small group found something very, very secret. They all got wiped out– except for Anna. He wants to know the truth. She blows some kind of powder on him, and he starts to shake. She’s drugged him. “I’ll tell you my story.”

In 1945, when Berlin had fallen, but the war wasn’t quite over yet, Anna was a Russian officer. Brana (young Anna) and two men have to take something important in a box to Moscow. It looks like a coffin, but we don’t see what’s inside.

Every night on the road, when it gets dark, they have to bury the box. Grigory thinks that’s strange, but he’s told to not think about it. Brana has nightmares at night since Berlin. Tor asks her why they bury it; she says that way if someone kills them, the box will remain lost forever.

In the morning, they dig it up and get back underway. They run into an ambush; it’s a sniper. The colonel is killed, but they get the sniper, a German “Werewolf.” They will only need to camp this one final night and get to the train in the morning. They bury the colonel next to the secret box.

Four of the men decide to go to the nearest town for some “spoils of war,” and Brana follows after them to make them return. The men remaining with the box talk about real werewolves and make jokes. Grigory and Iossif talk about Romans and their slogan “Remember Death.” Brana finds Ilyasov and they end up physically fighting. Some of the men succumb to poison smoke; one man wakes up and says it was a “werewolf.”

Back at the camp, Iossif hears something growing out in the woods, and he’s the only one still awake. There’s an attack, and they lose three men. Brana and Ilyasov return and argue about what to do next. The truck is gone, and they can’t carry the coffin all the way out of Poland.

Tor gets separated from the group. He runs into a woman from the village who agrees reluctantly to help him– she’s not afraid of werewolves. Brana meets up with a local man, Lukasz, who knows the area.

Some stuff happens to Tor in the dark.

Lucasz takes Brana and the others to a farmhouse where they can store the coffin overnight. Brana finally agrees to open the coffin to show them what’s inside. It’s the mostly-embalmed corpse of Adolph Hitler. They need to return the body to Moscow for absolute proof that he’s dead. They end up hiding the body in the basement of the barn.

Lucaz tells Brana about his now-dead wife and how he deserted after being conscripted. A group of Germans find Tor out in the woods and torture him to find out where “it” is. The Germans find the farmhouse where everyone else is hiding. The soldiers inside watch as the German leader stabs Tor in the back. Then the shooting starts.

Tor runs off; he’s not dead yet. There’s a long gunfight and lots of running around. The Germans eventually get away with the body. They talk interminably. The Germans figure out they kidnaped the wrong body, but now the Russians want revenge. Somehow, the barn gets set on fire with everyone inside. Eventually, one of the men throws Brana out of a window. Tor crawls under the barn where Dead-Adolph is and everyone burns.

The next morning, Brana looks through the debris. She went back to Moscow and spent six years in a gulag. Now she’s “Anna” and living in London. When she got out of the gulag, she went back to Poland and met up with Lukasz, who also survived.

The man Anna has tied to her radiator killed Lukasz only recently, and now he’s come after her. She makes the paralyzed man drink a bunch of poison. He won’t be coming after her again. As he dies, she pulls a hatbox out of her closet and opens up. It contains Hitler’s head.

Commentary

It would have saved a great deal of time if they had mentioned this up front:

Werwolf (pronounced [ˈveːɐ̯vɔlf], German for “werewolf”) was a Nazi plan which began development in 1944,[2] to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany, in parallel with the Wehrmacht fighting in front of the lines. It is widely misconstrued as having been intended to be a guerrilla force to harass Allied forces after the defeat of Germany, a misconception created by Joseph Goebbels through propaganda disseminated in the waning weeks of the war through his “Radio Werwolf,” which was not actually connected in any way with the military unit.1

That’s right; there are no monsters in this film. They don’t mean that kind of werewolf. Still, it’s advertised as horror, and it plays on Shudder, so… Someone made a mistake somewhere.

By the time we figured that out, we were more than an hour into it and wanted to finish. Then they all decided to stand around and talk interminably. It’s a pretty decent war movie. It’s a pretty decent action movie. Other than having a head in a box, it’s not a horror movie.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werwolf ↩