Krux (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for little reminders of Nazism
Take a Drink: for defeatist talk
Take a Drink: for dead bodies
Take a Drink: for cats
Do a Shot: for kittens
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
The Nazi home front during WWII isn’t often dramatized- even a century past the party’s formation, this degree of humanization of them isn’t popular. Perhaps the fact self-styled ones still exist is a factor.
Krux immerses us in a rural Eastern German community with women, children, and the few remaining men deemed unfit for service. The war is drawing to an end, though, and the approach of the Red Army will puncture any bubble of peace and safety they may yet feel.
A Toast
Life is still quite traditional in this small farming community- not only are the traces Nazism bare but there, but modernizations seems to have hardly encroached upon it, either. It has, though- psychically at least to start. Beyond basically all able-bodied menfolk missing, people huddle and listen to Allied broadcasts or read the pamphlets dropped from the sky and know what they say to be true- there will be no great Nazi victory.
German filmmaker Tony Vahl (this is her debut, which is incredible) applies a touch of Michael Haneke’s austere and harsh dark humor here- this society has rotted in the belly, revering strength and utility to such an extent they’ll drown their kittens and kids alike. Depiction is not entirely the same thing as humanization, after all. There’s a surprising amount of humor in the film, in fact- I don’t know how you don’t laugh out loud at the elementary school class in little sackcloth beekeeper outfits that make them look like poor cousin ghosts.
Make no mistake, though- this is a slowly building horror film drawing from real events. The few men left in the community decide that the advancing Soviets should find no livestock, no food or drink, and “not a single living German” when they arrive. As poison pills are passed around and schoolchildren are taught how to make nooses, and others don’t wait for fires on the horizon, small protests like an old woman’s or the village priest’s seem hardly sufficient.
When the artillery fire does start to rumble in the distance, it’s a genuine mystery what these characters will do- one never knows how precisely they’ll react to that elephant until they see it for themselves. History does tell us that plenty did do what many of these characters choose to, and also that some may have even preferred that to the the horrors that followed.
Beer Two
The end comes rather quickly, and in a bit of a jumble- this is one film, and particularly section of it- that could easily have used another ten or fifteen minutes of development, even if closure wasn’t exactly the goal.
Verdict
Krux traces one German village’s moral and societal descent in the last days of WWII, torn between dying for their cause and living in an uncertain new reality.
