The Colony

The last film to feature the Chilean coup was No from 2012, which explored the referendum that finally rid the country of General Pinochet and returned the country to democracy. There a genius adman plotted a brilliant campaign to get the right answer. Perhaps worthwhile viewing for those planning referendums?

In The Colony Daniel (Daniel Brühl) is an activist graphic designer and photographer based in Chile, making posters and flyers backing socialist president Salvador Allende immediately prior to Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Daniel's air stewardess girlfriend Lene (Emma Watson) arrives for her stopover and they rekindle their affair, spending their evenings at political rallies.

The characters are thinly drawn and the romance not entirely believable, giving the leads little to work with. The Colony is a German-produced film by German director Florian Gallenberger, set in a Spanish-speaking country but with English dialogue. It’s difficult to decipher where the characters are from – are they British? German? The latter, it transpires, which is important later on.

When the coup begins they flee their flat, Daniel taking photographs of the chaos on the streets of Santiago, which gets the couple arrested and taken to a football stadium. At this point The Colony appears to explore the fallout of the violent coup d’etat, like Costa-Gavras’s The Missing, focusing on the thousands of civilian “disappeared”. But a different kind of disappearance occurs, and the film takes a sidestep to uncover one of the coup’s weirder sideshows.

An ambulance whisks Daniel away to be tortured. He's tied to a bedstead, electrocuted and beaten up. Lene discovers from other activists that Daniel is at the mysterious “Colonia Dignidad” (Dignity Colony), a religious cult based in the south. She travels there dressed as a nun in an attempt to get him back. The cult duly admits Lene, who finds the compound run by German immigrants like a religious version of North Korea: the abuse is systematic, the propaganda constant. Paul Schäfer (Michael Nyqvist, pictured above with Watson) brilliantly plays the camp commander, leading the unhappy bunch like a Teutonic Jim Jones. Schäfer uses violence and religious mania to keep the inhabitants in check, leaving him free to abuse the children in his care. In one remarkable scene he attempts to raise a man from the dead.

The camp’s activities range from the brutal, through the nightmarish to the freaky. Lene finds herself working for Schäfer's underling Gisela (Richenda Carey), a sadist in the mould of Nurse Ratched or Rosa Klebb for whom she picks potatoes by day then peels them by night when not attending religious ceremonies before being plunged into a drugged sleep. Eventually she tracks down Daniel, who has feigned brain damage from his torture in order to be left alone.

At several points you wonder what the hell’s going on now, with some choices in the script and direction sowing confusion. But from a slow opening The Colony builds to a thrilling finale reminiscent of Argo. Its main appeal is the sheer madness of the story, particularly Nyqvist’s mentalist performance. While the story of Daniel and Lene is fiction, the Colonia was real: Schäfer, a Nazi paedophile, tortured Pinochet's undesirables in exchange for securing the cult’s independence. He used slave labour to manufacture weapons and poison gas. Schäfer was only brought to justice in 2005, for child sexual abuse, dying in prison in 2010.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Colony