The Scotsman Review

AN AMERICAN film that offers no glib story and no easy answers, The Believer is both a based-on-truth tale about a modern-day Jewish-American Nazi and, on a deeper level, a story about the desire to be simultaneously one thing and its opposite. This is, to say the least, a source of natural drama, a useful gift to a film-maker.

Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling) is first seen as a 12-year-old intellectual in the making, who is outspoken enough to argue about the Torah with rabbis. Later we see him, in his mid-twenties, browsing militia movement websites, pumping iron in the hope of anti-Jewish violence, decked out with swastikas (one on his arm, the other on his T-shirt).

Clearly brainier than the leaders of the fascist group he joins, he nonetheless has a taste for blood, instigating a brawl in a kosher restaurant, and thrashing a biker at a fascist camp. For this he is sent on sensitivity training, during which he encounters Holocaust survivors whose acquiescence in 1930s Germany drives him to arrogance and insults. But, in line with his desire to be a living contradiction, he is affected hugely by their tales (particularly of a three-year-old boy being bayoneted), and finds he cannot go all-out for the bombing of a synagogue. He even starts to teach his girlfriend (Summer Phoenix) the Torah.

What is fascinating about Danny is that he - unlike his fellow fascists - is no simple-minded fool but an extremely bright man who is quietly, sometimes desperately, struggling to assess his hostility . He is, in short, a weird fusion of thoughtfulness and hate.

Gosling is spellbinding throughout, able to create power from the simplest stare, the briefest blink, the smallest smirk. He appears in almost every scene and so has to be good. He is matched for excellence by director Henry Bean (the writer of Internal Affairs and Enemy of the State), who never overcooks the most dramatic situations, filtering them through the repressed, quietly seething Danny. Intensity and menace often grab the scene in moments of silence. A low-key treat.

- John Marriott