THE POLICE OFFICER’S WIFE: PRESS
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"The special thing about "The Police Officer’s Wife" is the intensity and truthfulness that director Philip Gröning has conjured up through the camera onto the screen. (...) German auteur cinema has not been this intense, this brute and yet this deceptively calm for a long time."
BR Kino Kino (DE), 09/2013
"The haunting study of a relationship that evolves from loving togetherness to brutal everyday hell."
Süddeutsche Zeitung (DE), 03/2014
"The film refuses simple interpretations, showing the emergence of "domestic violence" in the context of diverse, contradictory triggers. An extraordinary work in every aspect."
filmdienst (DE), 03/2014
"The Police Officer's Wife" is a biorhythmic experiment consisting of snapshots, atmospheric capsules, small self-contained stories. Mother, father, child. How they relate to each other, touch each other, live in the light of the other, are there for each other. How the togetherness fails. […] The protagonists, interacting in all their complexity, lead us into a parallel world, into many places, multiple personalities, the most diverse situations, each and every one of which is there. This existence is immovable because it concerns me directly and unmistakably. Because the fragment, properly inserted, is a splinter that takes hold."
critic.de (DE), 09/2013
"The most impressive arthouse film of the year."
NRC Handelsblad, 09/2013 (NL)
"In a phenomenological examination of the everyday life of a couple, the film shows the increasing wounds and hematomas in an inescapable mechanism of imaging, which ties the viewer to his chair through the intelligence of observation. […] An act of faith of cinema."
Corriere della sera (IT), 02/2014
"A visually spectacular piece; immersive and beautiful."
Heyuguys (UK), 09/2013
"In fact, "The Police Officer's Wife" shows more than it lectures, and provides plenty of material for debate and analysis about the threatening dynamics of intimacy, addiction, and violence."
Badische Zeitung (DE), 09/2013
"Gröning lays out pictures the way you would lay out a memory game. Pictures of wondering about earthworms and pictures of things no child understands. All scenes are separated from each other with preludes and credits. In this way, Gröning prevents them from merging. The result is an attention to the individual image that is otherwise only known from art exhibitions - only that we sit spellbound in front of them instead of strolling on. Cinema is learning from art here, and that is its great opportunity at a time of upheaval in the medium."
Die Welt (DE), 08/2013
"This cinema invites us to see differently, to understand differently. From the inside."
Der Tagesspiegel (DE), 03/2014
"Highly deserved, the Special Jury Prize went to Philip Gröning from Düsseldorf. Traditionally, it goes to the most innovative films in the competition, those that point cinema in new directions. This is what "The Police Officer's Wife" does more than any other."
Frankfurter Rundschau (DE), 09/2013
"Some of these scenes are among the most powerful things we’ve seen on screen this year."
The Playlist (US), 08/2013
"Without psychological explanations, out of pure observation, the immensely intense picture of inescapable domestic violence and destructive dependency emerges."
Radioeins (DE), 03/2014
"An intense, tough experiment."
Die Abendzeitung München (DE), 03/2014
"Gröning’s cinematography is nothing short of superb, meticulous both in the choice of frames and of lighting, a perfect means of conveying moods and emotional climates."
Screendaily (UK), 08/2013
"Philip Gröning's film "The Policeman's Wife" is not just a film, but a monument."
SR 2 (DE), 03/2014
"The Police Officer's Wife's power lies in the cognitive explosions it sets within the subconscious of the viewer that forcefully interacts with the formally audacious claustrophobic rhythms. Gröning's latest could easily be approached as a philosophical tract on the idea of how to watch cinema; a palate cleanser that illuminates an approach that demands an openness of mind and body which is slowly becoming a forgotten trait."
Cine-Vue.com (UK), 08/2014
"Gröning shows existential situations in the aggregate state of crystalline purity, shocking, without footnotes, without overarching meaning. Here, three people stagger through the empty universe with nothing left but to stare at each other again and again - there is nothing else for them. This is disturbing, at times monumentally despairing, and as a film a venture that comes so close to its characters because it leaves so much open."
Kölner Stadtanzeiger (DE), 03/2014
"In 59 variations, Philip Gröning tells of a compassionless world that simply keeps on turning, and for each of these variations he has found his own cinematic language. Sometimes he literally throws himself into a scene with his handheld camera, sometimes he remains a distanced observer. Sometimes he meets the characters at eye level, sometimes his gaze falls on their goings-on from above. But you always sense an oppressive closeness, an infinite compassion that leaves you speechless and deeply affected."
epd Film (DE), 03/2014
"Disturbingly intense study of the horrific evolution of a seemingly normal marriage. Captivating for its actors, camera and extreme formal rigor."
Radio Bayern 3 (DE), 03/2014
"The Police Officer's Wife" is harrowing and thought-provoking as it finds powerful cinematic metaphors for the genealogy of violence."
3Sat Kulturzeit (DE), 03/2014
"The film requires the viewer to take a closer look and not be too hastily fed with the usual. In this respect, the film is perhaps even less an astonishingly sophisticated examination of the dialectic of love and violence, less a philosophical intervention into what it means to be human and to act as human, but first and foremost an attempt to give the viewer the chance and the good fortune to have a true experience in cinema."
filmgazette (DE), 03/2014
"Tenderness and violence, love and hate can be very close to each other. This is also shown in the film "The Police Officer's Wife". Director Philip Gröning researched this topic for a long time - the result is now his deeply disturbing film, which tells of the abyss behind the facade of a happy family. (...) Captivating and deeply disturbing."
rbb, Stilbruch (DE), 03/2014