Review: The Zookeeper's Wife

Based on an extraordinary true story, The Zookeeper's Wife is a powerful, moving and inspiring film with a typically superb central performance from Jessica Chastain as Antonina Żabiński who, along with her husband Jan, who used their Warsaw Zoo to shelter hundreds of Jewish refugees.

Adapted from Diane Ackerman's book, which was based on Antonina's diary, the film begins as Antonina makes her morning rounds, greeting the animals and the customers who have come to admire the beauty of the various creatures. Antonina, Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) and son Ryszard (Timothy Radford) clearly love animals - lion cubs and a skunk serve as Ryszard's bedtime companions - and Antonina's maternal and empathetic nature is on full display when she revives a suffocating baby elephant.

The idyll is soon shattered when Germany invades Poland and bombs rain down on the zoo in what is arguably the film's most harrowing and striking scene. Animals, unsurprisingly skittish, scatter about, resulting in some surreal images such as the animals roaming amidst the rubble-strewn streets. Scenes of surviving animals being struck down by Nazi soldiers may prove too painful for animal lovers to watch.

Their zoo in tatters, the Żabińskis go about rebuilding with the help of their German friend Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl), who has become Hitler's zoologist. Heck allows the Christian couple to remain on the premises and even offers to keep their most prized animals in his Berlin Zoo until the end of the war. Unsurprisingly, his intentions and his obvious crush on Antonina soon devolve into the sinister. Antonina, much to Jan's dismay, carefully uses Lutz's feelings for her to their advantage as Antonina and Jan have been conducting a most dangerous mission: that of using their abandoned zoo as a way station to help Jewish refugees escape to freedom.

Having convinced Lutz to approve their zoo being converted into a pig farm, Jan is able to drive into the ghetto on the pretense of gathering scraps for the pigs to eat. Once in the ghetto, he smuggles as many refugees as he can into his truck, burying them under heaps of garbage, and then driving them out of the ghetto. Once back in the zoo, the refugees then take shelter underground until the night when Antonina plays on her piano to signal that the Nazi patrol have left and they are safe to come out. The fact that everything was done under the Nazis' nose and often in plain sight, such as Antonina dyeing the refugee women's hair blonde and then seeing them out the front door, is almost as farcical as it is daring and nerve-wracking.

Above all, Jan and Antonina's efforts mark the depths of their decency. Chastain does a beautiful job of expressing Antonina's resolve and matches well with Heldenbergh, whose expressive face Caro frames to great effect. Some may fault director Niki Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman for not injecting more shade and complexity into the Żabińskis, but not every hero has to overcome moral ambiguity or undergo personal growth. Sometimes people do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do.

The Zookeeper's Wife

Directed by: Niki Caro

Written by: Angela Workman; based on the novel by Diane Ackerman

Starring: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Brühl, Michael McElhatton, Iddo Goldberg, Shira Haas, Timothy Radford