German director Petzold has been influenced by other German directors, including Fritz Lang and R.W. Fassbinder, as well as American directors such as Hitchcock: when Nelly (played by Nina Hoss) returns from Auschwitz with her face destroyed her plastic surgeon puts her under anesthesia and asks her to count backwards from 10, mentioning Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon (1929), which has one of the earliest uses of such a countdown. Phoenix is about Nelly's attempt to find her husband after the war and his attempt, when he doesn't recognize her, to use her to pull off a scam to get Nelly's own inheritance, as he tries to remake her as herself, a plot reminiscent of Hitchcock's Vertigo as well as the films by Fassbinder of post-war Germany such as Lola (1982).
Petzold and his cinematographer, Hans Fromm, take unusual care with their expressive use of color, as the Phoenix club, where Nelly finds Johnny, uses bright red in its exterior in the middle of bombed-out Berlin, suggesting it is something of an entrance to hell. And Nelly's husband, Johnny (played by Ronald Zehrfeld, who rather resembles Fassbinder) dresses Nelly in a bright red dress in their grey and seedy apartment. Phoenix raises a lot of questions about ethics and personal responsibility in an oppressive environment but intelligently doesn't try to answer them, as Johnny brings Nelly "home" and they perform an elegant --and possibly meaningful-- performance of "Speak Low," by Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash.
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