Identity and a will to survive are at the heart of the mystery/drama “Phoenix.” Early in this German-language film, a disfigured concentration camp survivor, her face hidden under bandages, is asked by her plastic surgeon whom she wants to look like. Myself, she insists, but the surgeon balks and cautions her that that is nearly impossible after such trauma. 

The scene in this taut, Hitchcock-like film serves as a metaphor for how survivors of the Shoah were transformed by their experiences.

Nelly (Nina Hoss) is a Jewish-German cabaret singer who survived Auschwitz but returns with severe damage to her face from a gunshot wound. She is brought home to a Berlin apartment by her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), where she is to wait for plastic surgery and then settle her financial affairs before they both immigrate to British Mandate Palestine. 

At least, that is Lene’s plan. Nelly, who is the sole survivor of her family and has inherited their wealth, has other ideas. Nelly wants to find her non-Jewish pianist husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), although Lene tells her he was the one who betrayed her to the Nazis and has been trying to claim her inheritance even though he divorced her. 

Despite that, Nelly is adamant about finding him, saying that clinging to thoughts of him kept her alive in the camp. In a way, it is part of a desperate attempt to reclaim her identity and turn back time to life before the war.

Nelly’s denial of facts and her wish to find a lost love echoes Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” but “Phoenix” has other points of similarity. Nelly finds Johnny in a Berlin bar called Phoenix. He is now a desperate, sometimes violent man struggling to survive. He does not recognize Nelly after her facial surgery, although he thinks she looks similar to his ex-wife, who he believes is dead.

Rather than say who she is, Nelly embarks on a risky game of pretense to test his true feelings. 

Like “Ida,” a gripping survivor drama from last year, “Phoenix” explores the survivor’s journey to rebirth after the horror of the Shoah, during which the Nazis sought to erase individual identity as well as a whole people. 

But returning to a life or identity as it was before the war is impossible; the world and the survivor have been changed forever.  

Acclaimed German director Christian Petzold, who also directed the moving postwar drama “Barbara,” uses the fictional Nelly as a symbol of how survivors come to grips with what happened in the war — betrayal by friends and neighbors, the shattering of illusions, the meaning of  Jewish identity. 

The acting is superb, by Nina Hoss as Nelly, who naively, even childishly,  closes her eyes to what has happened as if she could wish it away; and Nina Kunzendorf as her friend Lene, who looks to a future Israel as the hope for a safe haven for the Jewish people. 

In a couple of scenes, the friends discuss the meaning of Jewish identity and the promise of a Jewish homeland. Nelly’s wish to forgive, to excuse people’s actions, to deny their actions, is contrasted against Lene’s clear-eyed view of events. Both characters are dramatically affected by what happens in Nelly’s search for lost love.

The overall production of “Phoenix” is superb. Images of bombed-out Berlin, the naiveté of American GIs occupying the city and the poverty of its residents evoke the postwar time brilliantly. A scene in which Nelly visits the elegant country home she and her husband shared before the war, which now seems like a dusty museum piece occupied by her former servants, serves as a piercing reminder of time gone by and how the landscape has changed. 

As Nelly and Johnny play out their plans, the film moves towards its emotionally raw, unforgettable conclusion.

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