The Tasters

Autumn 1943, in the small town of Gross-Partsch, Rosa, 26, has come from Berlin to stay with her husband Gregor's parents while he fights on the Russian front. She is seized by the SS and taken to a hidden facility with a chilling purpose. There she is pressed into tasting a dish meant for the Fuhrer to verify that it cannot be poisoned. As Rosa learns the rules and dangers of this shadow world, she joins a tightly knit group of tasters whose job is to safeguard Hitler through the meals he consumes. The pressures of war collide with personal loyalties in a tense historical drama.

Directed by Silvio Soldini, The Tasters is built from an original script by Doriana Leondeff, Cristina Comencini and Giulia Calenda. The cast centers on Elisa Schlott as Rosa with Max Riemelt, Alma Hasun, Emma Falck and Olga von Luckwald in supporting roles. The film blends drama and historical detail to illuminate a little known corner of war time life. It marks Soldini's return to a morally focused, serious tone and uses restrained performances and period texture to deepen the sense of danger surrounding a simple act of tasting.

Critically the film has drawn a measured response and a modest audience rating around 6.6 out of 10 from roughly two hundred votes. Reviewers praise the quiet, documentary-like mood that foregrounds Rosa's moral strain rather than sensational scenes. The core themes probe how ordinary people are shaped by fear and duty in a regime built on surveillance and fear, and how choices made in secrecy carry consequences far beyond the moment. The Tasters asks us to consider appetite, peril, and complicity as intertwined forces in a world where power hides in plain sight. While it stops short of absolutes, the film leaves a nagging question about how routine acts of care become tools of oppression.