The Lives of Others

Best Film at the European Film Awards. The culture of surveillance has consequences for the watcher as well as for the watched. It is 1984—not too far removed from George Orwell’s 1984—in East Germany. Wiesler is a Stasi officer whose life is no wider than his own coldly efficient professionalism. When he is assigned the case of Dreyman, a writer who is increasingly disillusioned by the collapse of socialism into venal totalitarianism, Wiesler begins to understand that to enter someone else’s life is to start down a path where there can be no turning back. As the web tightens around Dreyman, the secret policeman finds that he must make decisions which will alter his life irrevocably. Von Donnersmarck has delivered both a gripping thriller which draws on the recent opening of Stasi files, as well as providing a moving meditation on the way that history takes so many of us for fools.

A python-tight embrace of nuanced tension and emotional connection. It convincingly demonstrates that when done right, moral and political quandaries can be the most intensely dramatic dilemmas of all.

Kenneth Turan, LA Times