The Tasters

It’s 1943, Germany is losing World War II and the list of people who might want to slip strychnine into the Führer’s food is growing daily. Standing between Hitler and a poisoned flan is a group of young German women assembled around an austere dining table at Nazi HQ. To their horror, these reluctant culinary canaries will be swallowing toxins if it is. They’re surrounded by SS men with submachine guns, in case encouragement to tuck in is needed. Welcome to the Third Reich’s answer to Come Dine With Me.

Aspects of this scenario might have peeled from the pages of a Grimm brothers fairy tale, yet Italian director Silvio Soldini’s elegantly crafted but opaque wartime drama is based on a true story (it’s adapted from Rosella Postorino’s journalistic novel ‘At the Wolf’s Table’ by a phalanx of screenwriters). This shouldn’t come as such a surprise: the final years of Nazi Germany were riven with as much paranoia and mistrust as a Borgias court. 

Our protagonist is a displaced Berliner called Rosa Sauer (Elisa Schlott), who has moved in with her East Prussian in-laws while her husband fights in Russia. Next door, though, is the Wolf’s Lair. Soon, she and six other women are being bundled into a van and taken to sample the dishes prepped by Hitler’s personal chef twice daily. 

Material this thorny shouldn’t be handled blandly

Unlike Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge in Downfall, another wide-eyed fraulein plunged into the Nazi leader’s götterdämmerung, Rosa is one step removed from Hitler’s inner circle in The Tasters. The sense that something more interesting – or at least, more deranged – is happening next door lingers, especially when the women see the results of an actual assassination attempt billowing over the treeline. It’s clear that plotters aren’t looking at Adolf’s chickpea salads as their means of attack.

Instead, The Tasters scabbles around to manufacture drama, throwing in a yucky romantic subplot in which the lonely Rosa takes comfort in the brutish SS officer (Max Riemelt, terrifying) who oversees them all. One night he wakes from a nightmare and promptly confesses to his role in the Holocaust. Only then is she turned off, and politicised. This sophisticated Berliner must have been living under a rock. 

Material this thorny shouldn’t be handled blandly, and that’s where The Tasters ends up, fudging questions of morality and responsibility. It wants to make a resistance figure of Rosa. Maybe it should be asking if the dishes she’s tentatively sampling are just desserts. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Mar 13.