Cast: Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

Screenplay: Bernd Eichinger

Running time: 2 hrs 36 mins

Genre: Drama/History/War



CRITIQUE:


This aptly-titled WWII drama is unlike anything you’ll ever see in the war film canon. It puts one of the greatest monsters in the history of mankind as the movie’s central character. In other words, we are watching a story about a villain, which makes this film strangely out of the ordinary. And surely, crafting a film about Hitler, it takes colossal balls to mould an unbiased, accurate, authentic picture without stirring the perilous waters of controversy. We know what happened during the Holocaust, but German director Oliver Hirschbiegel sidesteps every bit of cliché and kitsch and dared to portray the last days of Adolf Hitler insider his underground bunker with his bunch of Nazi commandants and secretaries. The result is harrowing and claustrophobic. The cinematography is hued in the grim shades of green and grey, bleak blank walls with people in monotonous military costumes; the corridors and passageways resemble almost labyrinthine, serving a story that’s complex yet gripping. And outside this fortification is a realm in ruin, ravaged by war as the Red Army encloses and German civilians are dying. In this story there are no heroes; only a pointless savage war that claim lives.


But this is really a story about an oligarch’s downfall and his servant’s betrayal of their loyalties. This is where the picture escalates above an ordinary war movie. Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler is horrifyingly accurate – a mesmerising, tremendous performance; a testament to an actor that vanishes into the character he is portraying. Hitler comes to the fore as a moustached beast, with a rasping voice throwing tantrums in every opportunity, his left hand shaking in its own volition, but a very, very sad morose man who dwelled in his own flawed genius, extremely detached from the reality, the brutal, unsympathetic aftermath of his ambitions. Hirschbiegel doesn’t glorify anything, and the cruelty and horror of it all, seen by Hitler’s secretary Junge (a layered performance by Alexandra Maria Lara) who lived to tell the story. And if that particular scene of Magda Goebbels, a National Socialist mother, who takes away the life of her own children by feeding cyanide didn’t shock you enough, nothing else will.


VERDICT:

A compelling, heart-in-your-throat depiction of Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker. Audacious and staggering, Downfall is directed with fearlessness and acted with scarily cut-glass precision by Ganz. This may be one of the most indispensable movies made about the Second World War, portraying the collapse of the greatest of evils.



RATING: A