Curator Watchlist
A ferociously strange anti-fascist allegory that turns history into grotesque satire, black comedy, and body horror. It’s provocative, messy, and often unforgettable, with a central performance that gives the film its eerie power.
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 2h 42m
Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Starring: Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, David Bennent
In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.
Volker Schlöndorff
Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler, David Bennent
A ferociously strange anti-fascist allegory that turns history into grotesque satire, black comedy, and body horror. It’s provocative, messy, and often unforgettable, with a central performance that gives the film its eerie power.
The Tin Drum is one of those films that feels less like a historical drama than a fever dream about Europe’s moral collapse. It follows Oskar, a child who refuses to grow, but the film is really about denial, complicity, and the grotesque ways ordinary life mutates under fascism. Schlöndorff stages it with a mix of satire, nightmare imagery, and cruel humor that makes the whole thing feel both literary and deeply cinematic.
What lingers most is the film’s commitment to discomfort. It is funny in a nasty, almost indecent way, but it also keeps circling corruption, family rot, sexual taboo, and the rise of Nazism with real force. The result is uneven by design, yet its strangeness is exactly what makes it memorable.
This is not an easy recommendation, and it is not meant to be. But for viewers who want a major European art film that refuses to behave, it remains a singular experience: provocative, ugly, brilliant in flashes, and impossible to mistake for anything else.
russman (3.5★) · 518 likes
For someone drumming for all those years, you'd think he'd be a little more talented.
Sally Jane Black · 301 likes
There are three perfect moments in this film: The first is when Oskar's father Alfred picks up a potato and speaks lovingly of its tumescence. In or out of context, this is so ridiculous and bizarre that it deserves to be heralded as one of the best moments in film, ever. It serves as a minor note of characterization--he follows it up by yelling at Oskar for wanting to read and write, suggesting where his priorities lie--but mostly, it's a… more
davidehrlich (4★) · 162 likes
Restored cut. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON ÷ Emir Kusturica's UNDERGROUND + mad pubic hair and sexual taboo = THE TIN DRUM. what a beguiling film... hard to imagine such a resolutely strange, morally ambiguous epic winning an academy award in this day and age. David Bennent's alien embodiment of Oskar is one of the cinema's great child performances, embarrassing the precocious antics seen in infinitely easier fare like BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD. will review in full for Criterion Corner soon.
chavel (2★) · 152 likes
Famous for splitting the 1979 Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with the Coppola masterpiece "Apocalypse Now," alas, two winners. This 142-minute sorrow and the pity fantasy made from Germany has Oskar a.k.a. Urchin Forrest Gump of Poland (David Bennent, who was 12 when he shot this) as a 3-year old who decides during the Nazi rise that he will never grow and remain a child. Perpetually he bangs his drum in anger and revolt. His other habit is
LeSchroeck (4★) · 109 likes
Gesehen in der restaurierten Fassung. Vergessen wie irre, schwitzig, geil, ätzend und dreckig dieser Film doch eigentlich ist - oder schon immer war. Nur ist der Pferdekopf voller Aale jetzt noch ein Spur glitschiger, verfaulter, ekelerregender - und die Kotze von Angela Winkler (endlich habe ich den Erinnerungsanker, den ich nach „Dark“ so dringend gesucht habe) eine gut aufgelöste Ecke bröckeliger. Leider handelt es sich bei der Restaurierung „nur“ um die 142-Minütige Kinofassung, was ich ein klein wenig schade finde.
A surreal, satirical dismantling of social order that shares the same taste for absurdity and moral unease.
A visually elegant descent into fascist psychology and political complicity.
For viewers drawn to war cinema that becomes nightmare, trauma, and moral devastation.
A decadent, operatic study of corruption and fascist rot with a similarly poisonous atmosphere.
Another major German postwar reckoning, focused on survival, compromise, and national guilt.
Provocative, taboo-heavy, and psychologically unsettling in a way that will appeal to some of the same viewers.
Kafkaesque dread, oppressive systems, and a surreal sense of bureaucratic nightmare.
A metaphysical crisis film with apocalyptic weight and a strong sense of historical doom.
An ominous, symbolic film that blends realism with uncanny, dreamlike imagery.
For the theatrical intensity, emotional cruelty, and stylized European art-cinema sensibility.
A severe wartime moral drama about betrayal, endurance, and spiritual collapse.
A restless, existential European film about identity, history, and detachment.
anti-fascism, coming of age, refusal to mature, historical allegory, family decay, sexual taboo, black comedy, war and complicity
surreal drama, historical allegory, black comedy, war-era Europe, anti-fascist cinema, body horror, coming-of-age, art-house classic, grotesque satire, literary adaptation