Volker Schlöndorff directs David Bennent, Angela Winkler and Katharina Thalbach in this historical drama about Danzig in the grip of Nazism told from the point of view of a boy who refuses to grow up and objects to everything with his tin drum and shrill scream. 

An exhausting, uneasy and troubling history lesson. Epic in length it swings from grim realities to fableist fantasy sequences. There probably is a bit too much of Gunther Grass’ novel chewed off here to make a consistent whole. The ironic comeuppances of each compromised character we meet are bittersweet but often we don’t get anything more than infantile view of their lives and personalities before they go kaput. It is far too ambitious and captivating a sprawl to dismiss, there are at least a dozen visual moments that stay in the memory. Some of them quite unsettling.

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