'Ninth Day'

At the heart of Volker Schlöndorff's "The Ninth Day" is a wrenching moral dilemma. A Catholic priest, interred in a concentration camp for working with the resistance, must weigh the largely abstract costs of complying with Nazi demands against the very real costs of opposing them.

Ulrich Matthes, gaunt and stone-faced, plays the priest, released from the camp for nine days, ostensibly because his mother has recently died. It's the decent thing to do, Nazi functionaries explain.

In truth, he's been given a taste of freedom as an enticement. The Nazis want him to persuade his bishop to declare that Nazism and Christianity are two legs of the same philosophy. If he does, he'll be set free; if he doesn't, his own family members on the outside are in peril.

Apart from the troubling performance by Matthes -- he's disturbingly blank and restrained, with a stunned curiosity in his eyes -- one of the most impressive elements of this film is August Diehl as a former seminarian who has left the religious life to become a Nazi bureaucrat.

The bureaucrat's tortuous theological discourse is unsettling (the central lesson Jesus taught us, he says, is how to overcome being a Jew), and Diehl's performance is mesmerizing.

Schlöndorff ("Palmetto," "The Handmaid's Tale") starts his film with concentration-camp scenes of ritual abuse and torture of Catholic clerical dissenters. He doesn't dwell overlong on the scenes: they're powerful and graphic and unnerving enough that a small sampling of the camp life sticks deep within us through the film.

This is not a movie about concentration camps, but informs us emotionally about the camps as powerfully as many other films that keep us inside camp walls for two hours.

Those scenes of life within Dachau serve as something of a prologue.

The meat of the film, which is loosely based on the diary of Jean Bernard, is a day-by-day account of the priest's "furlough," during which he stays with his family but spends much of his time in meetings with the Nazi bureaucrat and local officials of the Catholic Church.

The priest's dilemma infects those around him. Family members debate whether they will be in danger if he does not comply with the Nazis.

The bureaucrat becomes increasingly, but ever-so-gradually, panicked as he starts to fear the priest will not cooperate. His Nazi superiors have let him know that it is he who ultimately will be held responsible, so his career and even his safety are in jeopardy.

This is not a tidy film. Nothing is clear-cut, and little is satisfyingly resolved, and a little more insight into the priest's consciousness might have made it more effective.

But it's undeniably powerful as it stands, a unique exploration of good vs. evil, of man vs. God, of the profound vs. the profane.

The Ninth Day Stars Ulrich Matthes and August Diehl. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff. Written by Eberhard Görner and Andreas Pflüger. 98 min. Not rated. Grade: A-

REVIEW