The Tasters

Silvio Soldini’s period drama, adapted from an award-winning novel, about the women forced to taste Hitler’s food for poison.

It is 1943 and Germany is on the defensive. Rosa, the young wife of a soldier, travels to her in-laws’ countryside home to escape the bombs in Berlin but unwittingly moves closer to a greater danger: the ‘Wolf’s Lair’, Hitler’s headquarters. There, she and other local women are forcibly recruited to taste his food for poison, the threat of death – by gun or spoon – hanging over them.

Adapted from Rosella Postorino’s award-winning novel At the Wolf’s Table, which was itself inspired by the testimony of Margot Wölk, Soldini’s drama is taut and drained of colour, the women sitting tightly packed around the elaborately laid table, day after day, with their breaks in the garden offering a rare release for games and secrets.