Albrecht Schuch

Watch Kat being read a letter. In Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), Albrecht Schuch plays Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older cobbler who cannot read and has his letters read to him, and while another man's voice does the words, Schuch does everything else: the set of the back, the small drop when the news is what he feared. Berger's film is loud and cold and keeps explaining what its trenches have already shown us. Schuch is the one part of it that never explains. The scenes he shares with Felix Kammerer's Paul, stealing a goose from a farmyard and eating it in a barn, are the only ones in which anyone smiles, and they moved us more than anything in the shelling did, because for a few minutes two men are simply hungry and pleased with themselves and we know it cannot last.

That film is where most British viewers met him. Germany had known for a while. After years of television, including Bad Banks and Mitten in Deutschland: NSU, he broke through in System Crasher (2019) as Micha, an anti-aggression trainer, and the following year played Reinhold, a drug dealer, in Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020). Dear Thomas (2021), as the writer Thomas Brasch, and Fabian (2021) followed. Then Berger, then the wider world, and most recently a lead in the Austrian satire Peacock (2024), which we have not reviewed and will not judge, except to note that it is the first time in a while anyone has asked him to be funny.

What critics at home notice is what we noticed: the physical commitment, the transformation, the refusal to lean on dialogue. He has said as much himself: "Ich glaube an Körpersprache mehr als an Worte", he believes in body language more than in words. In All Quiet this pays off because Kammerer, making his first film, plays Paul as a face being slowly emptied, and Schuch gives him something to look at that is not a corpse. It is a double act in which one man barely speaks and the other speaks for both of them without opening his mouth.

The one reservation anyone raises, and we share it, is that his best-known work is uniformly dark, and a man this good at absorbing punishment can find himself cast to absorb it for a living. Reinhold, Micha, Kat: troubled, intense, up to the neck in it. Nobody has yet put him somewhere with daylight in it and let him stand still. Peacock suggests somebody in Vienna has had the idea. We would like to see where it leads, and in the meantime the barn scene alone is worth the 147 minutes around it.