‘The World Will Tremble’ Review – A Story Of Survival, Resistance, And Memory

The World Will Tremble opens like a wound and never really lets you close it. It’s raw, immediate, and deeply human—an unflinching portrait of horror, survival, and the unbearable weight of bearing witness.

Director Lior Geller takes us deep into the rarely spoken history of Chelmno, one of the first Nazi extermination camps. It’s not a name you often hear, but the atrocities that happened there are impossible to forget once seen through this lens. And knowing the story is based on real events only makes the silence in between moments feel louder.

At the center of the film are Solomon Wiener (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Michael Podchlebnik (Jeremy Neumark Jones), two Polish Jews who are, quite literally, living among the dead. Their task—if it can even be called that—is to bury the bodies of the murdered. They are grave diggers for a genocide. The camera doesn’t dwell on corpses; it lingers instead on faces, on trembling hands, on what it means to survive in a place that doesn’t believe in survival. The emotional toll is painted in silence and stares. And somehow, that’s worse.

Geller makes a bold choice early on: very little of the German is subtitled. That decision traps us in the same confusion and fear that the Jewish prisoners must have felt. We don’t get answers. We don’t get the luxury of understanding what comes next. We’re disoriented, in the dark, and left to flinch at every shout, every order barked with menace. It’s an effective technique, but it’s not just a gimmick—it’s a gut-punch of empathy.

What’s perhaps most chilling in The World Will Tremble isn’t the violence, though there is plenty of that—it’s the performative kindness of David Kross’ Lange, the Nazi commandant. He smiles, he soothes, he offers lies like comfort blankets. “Tag your belongings, they’ll be returned later.” There’s something so grotesquely bureaucratic about the way evil is carried out here. It’s not madness. It’s paperwork. It’s calm explanations that precede death. Kross plays Lange with terrifying restraint; there’s no screaming, just smiling. And it’s somehow worse.

But this film isn’t just about despair. It’s also about resistance, however quiet or desperate. Solomon and Michael, broken and battered, dare to escape. Not to save themselves—but to tell the world what they saw. There’s something deeply human about that: the hope that truth, even whispered, might still mean something. Might still change something.

Oliver Jackson-Cohen is extraordinary. He’s not theatrical, not flashy, but there’s a weight to his performance that sticks. He’s a man clenching his jaw so hard you’re afraid it might shatter. You believe he’s seen things no one should see. You believe he’s carrying the weight of every scream he couldn’t stop. And yet, somehow, he still dares to run. To speak. To live.

As the film moves into its second half—into the escape—it shifts gears slightly. The dread doesn’t go away, but it morphs into a quieter kind of suspense. Can they make it out? Will anyone believe them? The tension never truly releases, but Geller wisely allows space for breath here. There’s beauty in these woods. There’s sadness in that beauty, too. Erez Koskas’ score plays a delicate balancing act—triumphant without ever being joyful, mournful without slipping into melodrama. It lifts scenes without overpowering them, like the softest kind of heartbeat beneath the horror. And Ivan Vatsov’s cinematography offers stark contrasts: the cold gray of death, and the warm gold of memory and loss. These are not accidental choices—they are storytelling through color and light.

It would be easy for a film like this to sink under the weight of its own sorrow. But The World Will Tremble avoids that trap. It doesn’t lecture. It doesn’t exploit. It remembers. With care. With anger. And with a quiet, aching grace—a tenderness curled beneath the scream. I felt it in my chest, like a bruise you forget about until you touch it again. Some stories need to be told over and over, not because we enjoy the telling, but because forgetting them is a kind of violence all its own. Geller knows this. And The World Will Tremble is, at its core, an act of witness. A refusal to let the world forget. It won’t be easy to watch. But it shouldn’t be. Because some truths still need to be whispered in the dark. Or shouted. Or carved into film.

The World Will Tremble is currently playing in select theaters and is available on VOD courtesy of Vertical Entertainment.