Starring Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, and Michael Maertens. In German and English, with English subtitles. Rated G.

Luminous German star Nina Hoss teams with director Christian Petzold for a gorgeously art-directed, powerfully acted, and thinly conceived follow-up to their masterful collaboration Barbara, set in the waning days of Communist East Germany. This one goes further back, to 1945, when bombed-out Berlin was divided into occupied sectors.

The slow-moving action centres on Hoss’s Nelly Lenz, a literally shattered Auschwitz survivor whose face requires total reconstruction. As she tells a weary social worker (Nina Kunzendorf), she’ll be unhappy with anything other than her original punim—the one loved by her husband, a pianist with whom she used to sing, and who might have betrayed her in the end.

The new face works (that is some incredible surgery for 1945) and she wanders through Berlin’s rubble, looking for Johnny. Played by Ronald Zehrfeld, he’s now bussing tables in a red-lit cabaret subtly named the Phoenix. She finds him there, but her attempts at explanation never get past the word “Johnny!” This suave hustler recalls crooks in Kurt Weill musicals like The Threepenny Opera and Happy End, and Weill himself is briefly heard singing “Speak Low”, the melancholy piece that serves as the film’s overused leitmotif.

The catch here, suggestive of Hitchcock, Franju, and Almodóvar, is that Johnny wants Nelly to pretend to be, well, Nelly, so they can claim her assets and split them. The fact that this “stranger” has identical handwriting, the same voice, and presumably the same smells never twigs his slightest suspicion.

Petzold’s screenplay, written with the late Harun Farocki, gives zero back story or dimension to Johnny, the only person unaware of what the audience already knows. Phoenix makes larger stabs at philosophical questions about identity and willful ignorance, but has no real urge to address them. Like Johnny, the movie’s implausible emptiness invites everyone else to do the work, but its motivations appear more exploitative than profound.