★★★★
"Nina Hoss gives a virtuoso performance...she is perfect casting in German director Ina Weisse's drama in which so much is left unvoiced...secrets hang in the air like a jarring, dicordant note in a concert performance.
There are few actors who can do more with just their eyes than Nina Hoss....she builds an entire charactere - angular, complex, frequently contradictory - out of flickering glances and the fretful crease between her brows"
Wendy Ide, The Observer
★★★★
"If Roman Polanski had directed Whiplash, something like this study of music's psychological cost might have resulted."
'Nina Hoss gives humane warmth to a tortured violin teacher. To Anna music is a war she can't win, a tortured servitude, her source of mastery and abnegation."
Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001) and Denis Dercout's The Page Turner (2006)...centered on pianistic cruelty. The Audition doesn't exalt this into the mad militaristic melodrama of Whiplash, or see music as explosive genius. Instead, Weisse soberly observes its quotidian making: the office politics of bitchy colleagues, and bus rides to work as the seasons change builging Anna's Berlin world.
Nick Hasted, The Arts Desk
"The always-compelling German actor Nina Hoss (best known for Barbara and Phoenix, her collaborations with director Christian Petzold) stars as a neurotic, conflicted violin teacher and mother in this sticky, stop-start drama set in the exacting, pressurised realm of classical music."
Leslie Felperin, The Guardian
"Never before has the idea of listening to someone practice Bach held such an attraction. It is entrhalling, like the characters Weisse has carefully created and masterly conducted."
Dan Carier, Camden New Journal/Islington Tribune/West End Extra
"Ingmar Bergman–meets–Joanna Hogg melodrama of obsession, compulsion, and self-destruction."
John Waters' top films of 2020 in Artforum
"Cunning"
"There's a special thrill in seeing an actor known for her own eerie perfectionism playing a woman who can't abide imperfection in herself or others. Hoss is one of the few actresses in Europe who can match Huppert for technical brilliance and emotional range, and she makes Anna a considerably kinder, more approachable kind of monster."
It's a showcase for a performer who erases the distinction between impeccalbe technique and raw feeling.
"Shot by the cinematographer Judith Kaufmann with a calm, stately camera that occasionally descents into flurries of agitation, the movie takes Anna apart with studied precision...allusions to her personal history have been arranged into a neat but artful psychological mosaic."
Justin Chang, LA Times
"Well-performed and crafted with the fine-tuned aesthetics of highbrow European arthouse flicks. (Nina's) razor-sharp performance passes the audition with flying colors."
Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
"Gripping, cold-blooded drama upends all manner of inspirational-educator cliche."
Weisse"s own form is unobtrusively immaculate, with Judith Kaufmann's sober, autumn-toned lensing perfectly matching the stately tone of the Bach-heavy soundtrack.
The Audition is often lovely to listen to, though you can never forget the human strain behind those strings.'
Guy Lodge, Variety
"There are shades of Whiplash and The Piano Teacher in this story that centres on an off-kilter rapport between a demanding music teacher and a gifted student.'
Weisse puts her own, distinctive spin on this film, keeping the audience guessing about whose story this really is, feeling its way slowly towards a bracing, risky dramatic conclusion that suddenly reshuffles the cards we've been dealt."
Lee Marshall, Screen International
"Nina Hoss is impeccable and illuminating, and the movie's forsquare, frank, brisk approach is salutary."
Glenn Kenny, New York Times
Seen purely as a character study, this one works."
Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
