Matt's Blog Living by the lake of salt.

Movie Review: The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others, or Das Leben der Anderen is a German drama film about a stasi operation in East Berlin in the 1980s. The movie tells the story of Stasi agent who follows his guidelines with chilling accuracy. His newest assignment is to wiretapping an author and his companion, an actress. Listening to their conversations, he gets more and more involved in their lives.

The agent is not an individual but a symbol for the whole system, where people did everything they were told to do. Clad only in gray and brown, filmed in stark and cold light, he's at first not capable of feelings. On the other hand his targets of surveilance represent the anti-Establishment, the intellectuals, who were severely hunted, arrested and killed by the government.

The most frightening aspect here is the banality of it all. The offices are bleak, the people talk about bugging operations etc. with a frighting causality. While eating lunch they talk about prosecuting the artists. These men in grey look, talk and behave like boring civil servants, and their approach, the "normality" of their job makes it terribly chilling.

The film is also able to recreate a feeling of constant observance and spying. In a disturbing scene a harmless joke becomes the center of suspicion and fear. We can glimpse how it must have been for citizens of the DDR, to live with constant suppression of their free will and opinion.

5/5 stars for the direction and acting of this film that works so greatly at not only evoking the time and place but the emotion of those who endured.