Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum) is a charming patient at a mental institution for Holocaust survivors in 1961 Israel. His doctor Nathan Gross (Derek Jacobi) is confounded. He is infatuated with nurse Gina Grey (Ayelet Zurer). He is haunted by dogs and starts to hallucinate. He finds a boy acting like a dog under his bed. Before the war, Adam was a magician, all-around entertainer. He was liked by everybody including the Nazis until he was put into a concentration camp. The camp was run by Commandant Klein (Willem Dafoe) who recognized him. Adam survived by playing the part of the Commandant's "dog" while his family is killed off.There is an interesting performance from Jeff Goldblum. However everything else is done with such lifelessness. Both the asylum and the concentration camp are locations of absurd lunacy. There is a rambling nature to the story. It is almost Kafkaesque. I wonder if there is too much time at the asylum. At its core, this must be a battle between Adam and Commandant Klein rather than Adam and the boy. The problem is that the movie spends too little time with Klein.

Not only some deservedly big international actors but also some local favorites from Israel do their best with a script that can scarcely scrape together a brief, weak thread of interest. The movie is based on a book by Yoram Kaniuk, who was also the author of HIMMO, KING OF JERUSALEM. Both stories are about hospitalized men. Evidently Kaniuk identifies with a fantasy protagonist who, by way of great suffering, achieves a martyrdom that returns him to a state of babyhood where he has no responsibilities but is the center of attention and is doted on by a beautiful lady in white. Not a healthy fantasy, but it's not the basic problem of the movie. The basic problem is that the incidents are insistently arbitrary. The hero is at first dependent on a Nazi whose whims are arbitrary. Then he becomes insane, so that his own behavior is arbitrary. Then he's put in a hospital where the rules, as far as the audience can tell, are arbitrary-- restrictive one moment, permissive the next. Unlike the patients in HIMMO, the surrounding patients here are ciphers; they are astoundingly well disciplined, always keeping quiet so that Adam can express himself at will. They restrict their personalities to a single quirk apiece and none of them presents any conflict that could drive a story-- except the boy who behaves like a dog. He presents an opportunity for Adam to redeem himself by helping someone who is in a way his mirror image, and thank goodness for this one escape from the arbitrary succession of dramatic but directionless incidents. Unfortunately it occupies only a little of the movie and is far too sketchy. A dream cast, a fine composer, good visuals-- all wasted.

I would never,never had gone thru the process to write a review unless it was the kind of movie like this: one Part One flew over the cuckoo nest and one part Earaserhead and one part Anne Frank and one part Elephant Man.It is grotesque yet teaches lessons and confronts life and all of its concerns.By far the best horror movie I have ever seen in my life!William Dafoe is at his sickest best and yet he is looking for and getting no sympathy or even pity.He is a horrible,horrible monster that could only have been created by the Nazi Hate Machine.The young boy that plays the dog does it with earnestness and yet resists the urge to make it into child's play or a sick comedy.Sorry for the simplicity but it is my very first review of a movie.Loved it!

Another holocaust movie.How many times do we need to be told that Nazis=Bad, while Jews=Good? It's high time to stop living in the first half of the last century. Sure, bad things happened, but come on. How many different perspectives can there be? How many oddball points of view are there? A former circus entertainer who was spared the gas chamber and is now stuck in a mental institution specifically for holocaust survivors? Are you kidding me? Why not the story of a former Jewish mechanic who escaped the forced labor of evil Nazi kitchens where he peeled carrots for 21 hours a day, and who now makes cat food for a living in Guadalajara while moonlighting as a house painter? How much more random can it get? What does this story offer to history? In what way is humanity bettered by it? What lessons are learned? None. That's the answer. This is crap. Turn it off.