In 1984, East Germany was a riot of beige. Locked down and paranoid, its twitchy citizens lived in fear of the Stasi, a government agency whose job it was to root out those who thought too freely: one false word led to invisibility if not incarceration. von Donnersmarck’s understated political thriller opens, ironically, in a lecture hall. Unforgiving flouro lights illuminate Captain Wiesler, a zipped-up officer who is tutoring Stasi recruits in the finer detail of interrogation. One student questions their ‘inhumane’ techniques, an enquiry that earns him a mark against his name. Such is Wiesler’s talent that he’s charged with monitoring Georg Dreyman, the darling of socialist theatre. Wisdom suggest that the playwright is so clean he must be dirty, and it’s for Wiesler to confirm this belief for the State.

The Lives of Others is an unusual story of German reunification (the narrative peaks shortly after Berlin’s wall crumbled) in that it questions what makes a man good, or bad, or something in-between. It also challenges contemporary thought on the legacy of German communism. Whilst von Donnersmarck makes no apology for presenting the Stasi in a singular dimension, his characters are more complex and flawed. Neither of these men are entirely what they seem and fall, as most do, somewhere in the middle. Weisler is inevitably corrupted by Dreyman’s values: a tin-man shocked by an injection of humanity. Yet Dreyman is no innocent and pays dearly. The Lives of Others is not a splashy production and owes more to a button-downed Scandinavian sensibility. It asks for emotional stamina and offers in reward a provocative psychological drama secured by a bleakly uplifting and thoroughly unexpected coda. It’s great filmmaking, the unforgettable kind.

// COLIN FRASER