 Winslet was unable to sympathise with Schmitz and struggled to play the part honestly without humanising her actions.Despite this, some historians criticised the film for making Schmitz an object of the audience's sympathy and accused the filmmakers of Holocaust revisionism.Todd McCarthy commended her for supplying "a haunting shell to this internally decimated woman", and writing for "The Daily Telegraph", Sukhdev Sandhu considered her to be "absolutely fearless here, not just in her willingness to expose herself physically, but her refusal to expose her character psychologically".