A Relentlessly Honest Movie Recounting Hitler's 'Downfall'!

Rating: 9/10 (21 April 2015)

Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel's thoroughly devastating digest of the Third Reich's final days, isn't about commuting the sentence that history gave the Nazis, but heeding its warning - a gruesome, sustained-tension lesson about informed politics.
The movie is based on the final ten days of the Third Reich, as told from the perspective of several key figures that were present in the bowels of a dank bunker beneath a burning Berlin that Adolf Hitler retreated to, as Germany was invaded by the Russian forces in 1945. Hitler, now hunched-over parody of himself, seems defeated from the moment we see him, but his megalomania and outright insanity is always lurking just beneath the surface. On some level, we sense — as do some of the characters in the film — that Hitler knows it's all over for him and his Reich, but that doesn't prevent him from ranting about delusional betrayals, moving nonexistent armies across maps and blatantly refusing to surrender even in the face of certain downfall. But Hitler's mindset is not the entire crux of this complex film, which is really just as concerned, and possibly more so, with his inner circle's reaction to impending doom. Once thriving individuals in the streets of a city that showered them in rude luxuries, they have now been reduced to mere rats in an underground maze. As the dream around them crumbles into heaps of rubble and their followers become corpses in crowded alleys, we watch the hope and strength fade from their faces. Like the characters of the best of Shakespeare's tragedies, they occupy the narrative like shattered mirrors of themselves, retreating to the safety of their self-delusions and often reflecting on the reasons for their imminent destiny, as if to quietly confess their evil and seek some semblance of respect before the end comes.
Downfall takes on the unenviable task of portraying Hitler as a human being, rather than a caricature or larger-than-life monster as the norm has dictated. But while doing so, Hirschbiegel simply strips away the myth from the monster, laying bare the utter banality of his evil. It features a staggeringly creepy performance by Bruno Ganz, whose Hitler is both a raving psychotic and a beaten, melancholic man. He generates indelible ferocity as Hitler - his composure snapping at will and foam frothing during his delusional flights of fancy about military might. He takes hold of the job with clenched fists; his manner of expression and the growl in his voice are so meticulous and researched, there is seldom a moment we consciously think about it as a performance; it is an uncompromised embodiment.
Downfall is a spine-chilling experience, a masterpiece of filmmaking which conclusively damns the repetition of its history. It is an unflinching, hard, relentlessly honest movie that refuses to ask questions that have easy answers. But even with all the tough questions the movie poses, it remains a long stare into an abyss from which no comforting answers can emerge.