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The Counterfeiters is a very fine Second World War Holocaust film. What makes this independently-styled film different from many of its Holocaust predecessors for me personally is that I enjoyed it, unlike more pretentious films. And aside from the spot-on acting and good screenplay, the story behind The Counterfeiters is intriguing with well developed character relationships based on real events.

The story revolves around the character of Adolf Burger, who had carved out a profitable niche for himself in the fallen Nazi-era German economy by counterfeiting currency. His schemes are short lived, however; he's discovered by the Nazi’s and thrown into a concentration camp. But surprisingly, rather than being subject to the same level of mistreatment as many of his fellow inmates, he’s teamed with other similarly skilled inmates. The Germans enlist them to collaboratively counterfeit foreign currency to help the Nazis destroy the economies of their enemies. A complex struggle between survival and moral principles emerges among the imprisoned men. Each finds his own particular coping strategy to deal with the untenable situation of their life at the hands of the prison guards while managing to preserve some degree of personal dignity against all odds. Based on a true story, Adolf’s affinity for artistry and his penchant for comprehending the “rules” of every survival game he’s given and playing by them to stay alive, grant him the good graces of one of German overseers. But in a world where guilt is associated by definition, and cruelty is the rule of law, every day presents new challenges that Adolf is forced to overcome if he wants to stay alive.

If you haven’t seen The Counterfeiters, don’t make assumptions on how you’ll feel about it based on your like or dislike for other similarly themed films. Rather, consider your affinity for “barrack” movies like Stalag 17 or Cool Hand Luke, and I think you’ll hit closer to the mark.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

This is a challenging title to review on Blu-ray Disc because the original film was shot in such a stylized way as to intentionally degrade the quality in terms of resolution, color saturation, and clarity in order to achieve a worn, tired, and weathered appearance befitting the mood of the piece. While this is the authentic vision of the cinematographer and should remain preserved regardless of delivery media, it does result in a Blu-ray Disc that may disappoint some viewers expecting to witness razor-sharp 1080p images on their new flatscreen monitor.

The AVC compressed 1.85:1 image is excessively grainy, muted, flat, typically soft-focus, lacking in detail, and lacking any sense of three-dimensionality. Many of the darker scenes exhibit a bothersome black crush where all shadow detail is swallowed up into a single monotone black blob, making it difficult to discern the edges of objects in the dimly lit shots. All of these disturbances are aspects depicting exactly how the director wanted you to see this film… most of which was shot on 16 mm film stock.

Is there an advantage, then, to watching this on Blu-ray versus DVD? Yes. And I can sum it up in one word: compression. Blu-ray exceeds the potential performance of DVD in more ways than just counting pixels; DVD is limited to MPEG-2 compression at a paltry bit rate of about 8 Mbps for real-world video applications, whereas Blu-ray can utilize more efficient video compression CODECs (AVC/MPEG4 in this case) and can also run at higher bit rates given Blu-ray’s wider bandwidth. What this means is that a grainy and soft-focus film like this looks like a grainy and soft-focus film on Blu-ray Disc. But for DVD, all the grain could result in a noisy, MPEG mess; grain would turn to digital noise and alias artifacts, so the compressionist must low-pass filter the video, further reducing the detail while easing compression. Although the Blu-ray Disc does reveal some very minor edge halos from time to time and so isn‘t 100% perfect, I have no doubt that any edge-emphasis would be even more pronounced on DVD, which typically adds copious ringing to content like this in an effort to improve clarity as detail is lost during filtering prior to compression.

These images won’t set a reference standard for 1080p, but it is worth purchasing over a DVD alternative.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The original language lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix is tame, but nicely dimensional, well recorded, and preserves a good degree of acoustic cues in the mix that allows the front soundstage to expand comfortably. While there is very little in the way of surround effects, the surround use does provide some ambient dimension for this otherwise pleasing, but front-heavy soundtrack. The mix is perfectly suited to the material, and the lossless presentation helps convey natural dialogue timber and musical realism in the score.

A lossless TrueHD French track is also available, as are English Captions and Subtitles, along with French and Spanish subtitles.

The Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

All of the content from the DVD is presented on the Blu-ray Disc, so nothing is sacrificed in the upgrade to BD. The only real criticism is that the content is all standard definition, though each item is well worth the time to view for anyone who enjoys the feature film.

First up we have a nice director’s commentary by Director Stefan Ruzowitzky (in English), which deals primarily with many of the technical aspects of making the film. The ten minute featurette The Making of The Counterfeiters is in German with English Subtitles and feels a bit like a promotional piece, although it‘s still interesting. More engaging is the 18 minute interview with Director Stefan Ruzowitzky (in English), which digs deep into his inspiration for making the film and touches on the issue of balancing historical accuracy with “movie worthy” drama.

Most fascinating is the ten minute interview with Adolf Burger in German with English subtitles. This 90 year-old concentration camp survivor talks about his personal experiences and his own (positive) feelings about a dramatization taking liberties with his story. As a corollary, the ten minute interview with actor Karl Markova’s (English) does a nice job discussing how he approached the task of revealing the character and preparing for the role.

The 20-minute featurette Adolph Burger's Artifacts (German with English Subtitles) allows the real survivor to tell his own story and display some of his own artifacts and renderings of his account. The 13-minute Q&A with Director Stefan Ruzowitzky (English) captures a discussion between the filmmaker and audience members after a festival screening in 2007. I found this to be very interesting as it touched on a different sort of question-set than is covered in the rest of the production features. We also get four deleted scenes which fans will appreciate seeing, and the film’s theatrical trailer.

The disc is also BD Live enabled which means you get access to the generic Sony server as with other Sony BD-Live discs.

Final Thoughts

Having more in common with classic films such as Stalag 17 and Cool Hand Luke than a typical Oscar-oriented Holocaust drama, The Counterfeiters masquerades an uncommonly interesting and seldom discussed slice of WWII history that’s been dramatized in the guise of a genre- inspired film. Image quality will disappoint those expecting to push the boundaries of their 1080p displays, but this true-to-the-source Blu-ray Disc faithfully captures the very intentionally degraded and stylized look of the original film elements. The lossless audio is fine, and the supplements are well worth watching, their only fault being the lack of high definition resolution on the disc. An easy recommendation.