I always find myself using the word ‘deftly’ when reviewing Christian Petzold’s films but that’s because there’s an effortlessness to the filmmaking that feels so completely natural. In PHOENIX, Petzold deftly weaves threads of personal identity and political identity such that Nelly (Nina Hoss) rebuilding herself through the eyes of another after her unimaginable trauma is also the story of Germany reconstructing itself as a nation after the national shame of the Holocaust and Zionist Jews rebuilding themselves in Palestine as what Naomi Klein (2023) calls the “New Jew—that unbound alter ego of the pale, studious, melancholic Old Jew.”