Title: The Uniformed Shorts Review VIFF2025-25
Foreign Title: Die Uniformierten
Year: 2025
Country: Germany
Language: In German with English subtitles
Director: Timon Ott
Armies are often seen as disciplined, organized machines with strict hierarchies and clear purposes. Uniforms erase individuality, submerging the person into the collective.
The Uniformed unfolds within this context, during basic training. It follows an 18-year-old recruit who has committed to 17 years of service, training to become a pharmacist in the medical corps. We never learn his name, yet his voiceover leads us through the daily routines of a soldier in peacetime—marching, parading, shooting—gradually revealing their absurdity and emptiness. His narration is reflective, even weary, as he considers the monotony and futility of the tasks. A friend drops out; he continues. Nothing here feels heroic.
The film’s strength lies in its form: a hybrid of documentary and home video aesthetics. Its plain, almost banal imagery echoes the soldier’s monotonous reflections, reinforcing the sense of a youth caught in a commitment he barely understands.
If you remember Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket open scene with its 20 mins of intensity and violence, this film is the complete opposite, it lingers on banality, detachment, and drained of drama. I highly recommend it!
