Truly gripping.

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2012)

This movie is definitely one of my favorite German movies ever. I visited the Hohenschönhausen prison in East-Berlin some time ago so the opening sequence of this movie really hit me in the face because I know the place and the things you see in the movie were a reality not so long ago. The actors are brilliant. The script is perfect. The sets are historically correct and give you a good impression of how it felt to live in the DDR. Not really a "feel good"-movie but a message to set the records straight about the DDR-regime and its StaSi-system. Even the difficult parts, like the fact that there are a lot of former DDR-officials who still don't have any regrets about what they did, are not skipped. A true masterpiece.