Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson are the middle-aged couple Anna and Otto, each of them grieving in their own way over the death of their son in the French campaign.
True story: In the heady early days of the Second World War in Germany, a quiet, cautious working-class couple mounted a discreet, doomed campaign of resistance against the Nazis. It involved anonymous postcards, left at random Berlin locations, with messages that denounced Hitler. The story was fictionalized in the 1947 German novel Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, and now again in the dour war drama Alone in Berlin. Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson are the middle-aged couple Anna and Otto, each of them grieving in their own way over the death of their son in the French campaign. Gleeson plays factory foreman Otto as stoic and laborious. His doubt-seeding anarchy is an incremental uprising – sand in the war machine gears. Daniel Bruhl plays a police inspector who plots pins on a city map as a way of zeroing in on the postcard-dropping "hobgoblin." There's little suspense though; the procedural is drab. More interesting is the city's air of suspicion and distrust – support for the Nazis is done conspicuously. Alone in Berlin is a modest, hard-faced film, offering a nervous study of humanity and civil disobedience in a societal-bullying era. Its intentions are commendable and its photography is fine-looking, but the drama is as low-key as the couple's small, symbolic insurgence.
Brad Wheeler