Chilling

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 2018)

April 1945. The Allies are marching towards Berlin. Within his hidden, reinforced bunker, Adolf Hitler celebrates his 56th birthday. A few days later he will commit suicide, heralding the end of World War Two. This is the story of those few days, largely based on the memoirs of Traudl Junge, Hitler's personal secretary.
A provocative subject, if nothing else. Especially because it takes the bold step to portray Hitler as a human being. A horrible, twisted and utterly racist human being, who has been given way too much power. But a human being, nonetheless. A point of view that is much rarer than you'd think. It's actually a common joke that the first thing you should do with a time machine is to go and prevent Hitler from being born. Yet at the same time it is a widely accepted theory that Germany would have rebelled and started another war even without this one man from Austria-Hungary. Perhaps it would not have been such a large war, and it's quite likely that the Jews would not have suffered so greatly. But Europe would have bled.
Still, even this Hitler is very much a caricature . Bruno Granz plays him in a way that to me speaks of wanting to distance himself from the character. His Hitler is a ruin. A stuttering, shaking shell of a man, human only in form. Granted, this has some basis in reality, based on multiple accounts of those final days in the bunker. Still, this Hitler would be a pitiful sight, if he wasn't who he is.
And perhaps that's the point. Hitler's evils were horrible and devastating in nature, but they weren't the result of some outside force, cosmic imbalance or anything else like that. We're not given that comfort. Rather they were the result of human nature. Which is a bitter truth to swallow, but a necessary one.
An interesting movie and recommended for fans of war and period films. High production values, good acting, tense atmosphere and a subject matter that isn't examined that often.