Alone in Berlin

A bit of a mid­dle­brow snooz­er this one. Alone in Berlin is a film about the pow­er of activism, the dan­gers of rev­o­lu­tion, and the anx­i­ety that comes with mak­ing the deci­sion to take a shot at the high­est pow­ers in the land. Sad­ly, the film itself doesn’t chose to take inspi­ra­tion from any of the story’s cen­tral themes, offer­ing the most basic and work­man­like ren­di­tion of a 1947 nov­el by Hans Fal­la­da that was loose­ly based on true events.

The image of Ger­many dur­ing World War Two was that it was a fes­ter­ing hub of evil pop­u­lat­ed by blood­thirsty fanat­ics hap­py to stand by as an entire race of peo­ple is exter­mi­nat­ed on their watch. But this film sug­gests it was all pro­pa­gan­da and that there were peo­ple who stood at odds with the vio­lent will of the Führer. Otto and Anna Quan­gel (played by Bren­dan Glee­son and Emma Thomp­son doing ​“cher­man” accents) receive first-hand expe­ri­ence of the Nazi meat grinder when they find out that their beloved son has fall­en while on duty.

Far from just wav­ing it off and accept­ing that their beloved off­spring died for a greater cause, Otto and Anna instead decide that enough is enough. They can’t see the point of all this war­mon­ger­ing, espe­cial­ly as most of it seems to be at the expense of nor­mal work­ing class folks expect­ed to give blood for a sys­tem that offers them no real ben­e­fits in return. And so, they begin to pen sedi­tious post­cards with slo­gans that sul­ly the good name of Adolf Hitler and leave them around the streets of Berlin. The SS go bananas and employ Daniel Brühl’s gestapo inspec­tor to track down the perpetrators.

All the ingre­di­ents are there: cloak-and-dag­ger schemes exe­cut­ed under cov­er of night; a seem­ing­ly incor­rupt­ible antag­o­nist who will stop at noth­ing until he’s snagged his man; ripe con­tem­po­rary res­o­nances about how resis­tance – what­ev­er form it takes – is nev­er futile. But direc­tor Vin­cent Perez has turned in a hand­some but under­charged and dra­mat­i­cal­ly flat ver­sion of these events.

It hits all the right emo­tion­al beats exact­ly on cue, almost to the point of tedi­um. It takes no risks with the visu­als, cap­tur­ing the action in the most basic and safe way imag­in­able. In all, this feels like a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty, with Thomp­son and Glee­son doing lit­tle more than keep­ing time as unlike­ly rad­i­cals want­i­ng to risk their lives in mem­o­ry of their son.