The Tasters film review: Chilling historical drama
The role of Hitler’s food tasters is dramatized in this imperfect but necessary depiction of bureaucratic cruelty
Food, with its emotive connotations and potential for weaponisation, has always been a ripe subject through which to examine cruelty. In Silvio Soldini’s adaptation of Rosella Postorino’s novel, a group of women are forcibly recruited to taste Hitler’s meals for poison during the paranoid final years of World War II. It’s a story whose authenticity is uncertain (Hitler’s food tasters were unknown until 2012 when 95-year-old Margot Wölk claimed to have been one of them) but to dwell on that would be to miss the point; historical drama’s purpose is not necessarily to document but to harness an era’s circumstances and ask ‘what if?’ in order to examine deeper truths.
In this sense The Tasters succeeds, serving up a messy tangle of shifting relationships against a terrifying backdrop. Rosa Sauer travels to live with her in-laws near Hitler’s notorious Wolf’s Lair bunker, while her husband fights on the Russian front. Before long she’s hauled in as part of the tasting group. The film excellently depicts the clinical, bureaucratic cruelty of the Nazi regime; the women are medically examined, presented with a feast and only afterwards told of their mortal danger.
However, the role of food recedes as the drama turns its focus instead on friendships and dangerous affairs. It’s a pity the film loses that thematic clarity, but despite this (and a tendency towards expository dialogue), The Tasters paints a vivid picture of the grim circumstances under which Germans were forced to exist; with the threat of death in every direction, even from an innocuous bowl of soup.
The Tasters is in cinemas now.