HBO’s ‘The Survivor’ Is a Brutal, Personal Retelling of One Man’s Resilience

There is a brute delicacy on display throughout Barry Levinson’s harrowing film, The Survivor. In the opening moments, Ben Foster’s Harry Haft looks out at the ocean, and the waves crashing together seems to remind him of time in the ring as a boxer and time before he was captured and placed in a concentration camp. With towering control, Ben Foster gives the best performance of his impressive career as a man suffocating with guilt for surviving when so many were killed.

After World War II, Harry Haft became known as the Pride of Poland and The Survivor of Auschwitz as he entered the boxing ring. Hearing the announcer make the introduction in 1949 remains shocking so many years later, and he prides himself in never giving up a fight even when he receives a bloody beating. When a reporter, Emory Anderson (played by Peter Sarsgaard) approaches Haft with a chance to tell his story of how he escaped the camps, Haft thinks it’s an opportunity for his lost love, Leah, to see his name in the papers and finally make contact.

The film bounces back and forth between Haft in 1949 as he continue to grapple with his trauma with black and white flashbacks of his personal experience as a prisoner. What Haft has never revealed was that he became a toy of torture against other prisoners when Dietrich Schneider (Billy Magnussen) recruits him to be box other inmates for the folly of Nazi officers.

“I want you to become an entertainer,” Dietrich requests of Haft in one of their tense early scenes together.

When Anderson’s article is published, other Jewish people in the community brand Haft as a traitor, but Levinson confronts those feelings by asking us what we might do in the same situation. Fight or die. Those are the only choices Haft was given.

Foster has always been one of his generation’s most accomplished performers–whether he is given his flowers or not. Haft is a broken man searching for ghosts and forgiveness, and he doesn’t know if he deserves to find either. Haft became famous for his experience in the camps, but, later in life, he doesn’t want his own son to know what he had to go through in order to live. Much has been said about the physical weight that Foster shed and gained to honor Haft, but watch him in the moments where he barely says a word. Foster gives an unforgettable performance that we will be talking about for a very long time. You will have difficulty describing just how good he is in this role.

As Schneider, Magnussen takes his boyish, himbo smile and confidence and twists it into something totally terrifying. When Schneider watches Haft fight other prisoners, you can feel his pulse racing. The unchartered glee he feels every time Haft lands a punch is one of the most disturbing flashes we see throughout. You will never look at him the same way again. There is a scene where Haft and Schneider, after training, discuss Germany’s potential failure, and it’s one of the most thought-provoking of Justine Juel Gillmer’s rich screenplay.

No film about the Holocaust is a definitive version. We are still accumulating stories. Harry Haft searched for his own personal peace his entire life, and The Survivor feels like a gift. It’s a tribute to a man who would not go down without a fight, and that alone is inspirational in the face of true, unflinching evil.

The Survivor debuts on HBO on April 27th.