Love and Alarum: A period piece that feels stuck in time

Is this for you?

Honestly, if you want a fast-paced thriller, stay away. This is for the folks who like old-school, slightly dusty European cinema where people stare at each other for a long time across a crowded ballroom. If you’re allergic to melodrama or black-and-white slow burners, you’ll probably hate it.

It’s worth watching if you want to see how they handled romance back in the day without turning it into a total mush-fest. It’s got that specific kind of 1930s polish that feels both expensive and strangely empty at the same time.

That party scene...

The whole thing kicks off at this massive New Year’s party. The costumes are incredible, but the extras in the background have that classic "I don't know what to do with my hands" look going on. You can tell they were told to just mingle, and it feels a bit like a high school play with a way bigger budget.

Gustav Fröhlich and Maria Andergast have this chemistry that’s… well, it’s polite. They aren't exactly setting the screen on fire, but they do this thing where they look at each other with such intense seriousness that you almost believe they’re in love. Almost.

War gets in the way

The movie does that thing where it ignores the politics for as long as it can. Then, suddenly, the music stops and the world is falling apart. It reminds me a bit of the mood in Abismos where the atmosphere feels heavy before anything actually happens. The shift from champagne glasses to military uniforms is jarring, which I guess is the point, but it feels like the movie skipped a few pages of the script.

There’s a moment near the middle where an officer is just standing by a window, and the camera lingers on his profile for maybe ten seconds too long. I found myself looking at the pattern on the curtains instead of his face. It’s that kind of movie.

• The lighting in the ballroom is surprisingly moody.
• Some of the dialogue is so stiff it sounds like they’re reading off a blackboard.
• The uniforms look like they actually weigh twenty pounds.

It’s not perfect. It’s not even great. But there’s something about the way it captures the end of an era that makes it stick in your head. It’s not quite as messy as Synthetic Sin, but it shares that same weird obsession with social posturing.

Sometimes the movie gets noticeably better when it stops trying to be a sweeping epic and just lets the two leads be sad in a quiet room. I wish there was more of that. Instead, we get a lot of walking through hallways and looking at maps. 🤷‍♂️