“A bee which doesn’t have the strength to serve chooses death,” says a schoolteacher. “It’s the only way,” answers a young mother. “For the fatherland,” adds the town mayor. These utterances, made again and again, remind us of the darkness of the socially enforced subservience that oozes from every pore, every crack in the furniture, in the small northeastern German village featured in Tony Vahl’s debut, Krux, which premiered in Toronto’s Discovery strand and is now vying for the Golden Shell in San Sebastián. The film immerses us into this community’s breakdown during the very last days of the Second World War, just before Germany’s surrender. The story is based on real accounts and studies on the wave of organised mass suicides which occurred across Germany during this time.

Jella Haase plays Greta, the stoic, grieving wife of a dead soldier, who contributes to the life of the community by taking on a large share of the manual labour, like many women in this wartime context. She becomes our entry point into this heavily gendered world, but is by no means our only protagonist: Greta’s friend Anni (Frida-Lovisa Hamann), mother to several young kids, as well as a group of schoolchildren (Marlene Franzone, Hugo Goers, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Phileas Heyblom) offer a glimpse into the realities coexisting in this village, a carefully cultivated environment where doing as one is told is not a difficult decision.

The mayor, Walter (Lukas Miko), the teacher, Fritz (Clemens Schick), and the local pastor, Albert (Martin Wuttke), emerge as pillars of the community’s patriarchal structure. When they receive the order not to leave anybody in the village alive for the Red Army to find after the defeat, their differing viewpoints provide the driving tension for the film – indeed, unlike the mayor who is determined to fulfill his duty, the teacher is unsure, and the pastor is against it. The lingering shadow of complicity remains as the village is kept in a state of ignorance and obedience, even as Thomas Mann’s anti-fascist addresses to the German people (now well-known, from Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland) play on the radio.

The story unrolls in a piecemeal manner, as the villagers only get tiny fractions of reality, one at a time, to inform their truth – meanwhile, the bodies that wash up on the riverbanks are quietly hidden away in the school gym. Krux’s richly inhabited world deals in quiet reveals, animalic motifs and unspeakable discoveries guided by DoP Piotr Sobociński Jr.’s camera as it follows one character or another, until something horrifying is revealed.

Writer-director Vahl demonstrates an impressively strong grasp of atmosphere without feeling forceful. The mise-en-scène is eerie but never creepy, haunting but never repulsive. As for the village, always overcast by day, it is lit only by the orange glow of candlelight at night. A deep humming which almost has the droning quality of an air-raid alarm (the film doesn’t have a conventional score per se, but the music is credited to Lorenz Dangel and the sound design to Johannes Hampel) acts as an omen of what is to come.

Where Vahl really succeeds is in striking a balance between offering a commentary and conducting a reflection, refusing to indict internal propaganda just for the sake of being political. Instead, Krux becomes a rumination on the dangers of the so-called inherent cultural morals through a case study based on an environment so tautly wound that what should be a choice feels like a beautiful duty. This being said, all naivety aside, this film could not be more relevant today. The mayor’s words are perhaps what encapsulate best this plight: “cyanide pills smell like cake, he says, and the delicious poison of bitter almond.”

Krux was produced by CALA Filmproduktion GmbH (Germany) and Extreme Emotions (Poland), in co-production with CALA Film Central GmbH & Co KG and Kineo Film GmbH. World sales are handled by Global Constellation.