The Ogre

The seductiveness of Nazism is explored through the eyes of a simpleton in this 1996 fairy-tale history of World War II, directed by Volker Schlondorff and based on Michel Tournier's 1970 novel The Erl King. Orphaned Abel (John Malkovich) grows up in a strict French orphanage, a lonely, fanciful youngster whose only friend dies in a fire that Abel believes he wished into existence. By 1939 he's grown into an introverted, childlike adult whose best friends are still children, and who nurses the secret belief that he's protected from the world's random cruelty by his magical relationship with fate. He hopes to extend that protection to his young friends, and i...