The Lives of Others Review

The film opens with Wiesler lecturing cadets on how to break a suspect using sleep deprivation and the smell of fear, a scene that functions as a loaded gun: everything he teaches, he will later use to protect rather than destroy. Ulrich Muehe gives one of the great withholding performances, a face trained to show nothing, so that the smallest concessions, a swallow, a hand going still over the transcript keys, carry the entire arc. Donnersmarck's construction is airtight, with the typewriter under the floorboards and the red ribbon planted early enough to feel inevitable rather than convenient.

Hagen Bogdanski drains the palette to bureaucratic greens and browns, and the attic set is deliberately drab, the visual scheme functional rather than expressive. The Sonata for a Good Man is a slightly on-the-nose device, an aesthetic conversion triggered by hearing a piece of music. Historians have fairly noted that no Stasi officer is known to have done this, that the film grants the machine a conscience the record denies. The last exchange in the bookshop, four words, remains a near-perfect landing.