I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

There's no doubt that Rudolf Ditzen - or rather, Hans Fallada's book Every Man Dies Alone, or Alone in Berlin, is a masterpiece. This film 'adaptation' is far from it and is actually insulting the book and the true story and memory of Otto and Elise Hampel. A period drama set in Berlin during the heyday of Hitler's Nazi Party is an exceptionally ambitious, difficult and costly film to recreate, and the film maker and his team seem to me to have gone about this project in totally the wrong way - it's a confused jumble of priorities which negated the essence of the story and therefore the script completely lost sight of the intricacies and emotions of the real characters and the time in which they lived. The only real way to do justice to the novel is to serialise it as a television series; to explore the paranoia and the fear and the difficulties of living under the fascist regime, to show the poverty and hardship, the insidious mistrust of person for person, the degradation of society and the desperation of the inhabitants of Germany at that time. The film maker completely misses all of this, instead creating an atmosphere largely based on washed out colour and nothing being said. The costumes are far too neat and clean, everything is shiny and lovely and carefully placed, the casting is appalling - Emma Thompson, bless her, does pull in a good performance, but Brendan Gleeson plays himself as usual, and the detectives are just young boys completely out of their depth. And Depth is the biggest argument I have against this mockery of a great story ... there isn't any. It's superficial to say the least - only 10 percent of the characters from the original novel appear and the film maker pays little attention to those ten. It looks like it was filmed 'on the hoof' with very little thought for drama and direction, largely leaving it up to the mediocre actors to supply the viewer with the pathos needed. I wonder if when filming it more time was given over to style (which is largely inaccurate) than actual substance. This is not Alone in Berlin, it's simply a vacuous film that borrows a small idea from a truly dramatic, sad, and powerful real life story. Extremely disappointing and immature in every way.

Gleeson & Thompson just don't gel as the grieving couple , but blame that on the writers. The couple are cold towards each other especially while out of earshot of others while in their apartment, they never talk about the son they lost, never talk about what he was like as a child or how they felt when he went to war. In one scene they celebrate the son's birthday but that is very quick and not a total expression of the true loss. Both actors do what they can with the little they got, but unfortunately for me it was not enough. In reality what was the point? A german couple certainly could not change anything with this idea they had and nothing was known of it till 2009. The story is lost in boredom even though it is based on a true account but that too is a fictional synopses of what happened at the time. The problem I have with this story is if the son had not died during the war then his parents would have happily continued to support hitler.

My opinion-.This movie of Vincent Perez was for my part very well realized and it knew how to draw the maximum of right emotions by strong images, making this beautiful thriller dramatic. Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, Daniel Brühl, who gave their full performances to this movie based on this true story. It evokes German resistance to the Nazi regime and the conditions of survival of German citizens during the Second World War. It is based on the real story of Otto and Elise Hampel, executed on April 8, 1943, at the Plötzensee prison for acts of resistance and whose file at the Gestapo was transmitted to Hans Fallada after the war. Realistically, this movie, based on the novel by Hans fallada published in 1947, which denounces the barbarity and cruelty of the Third Reich, the baseness of human nature subjected to fear and hatred and emphasizes the courage of A few who, in order to remain in harmony with their conscience and contribute to the destruction of that regime, were ready to give their lives. Moreover in this movie, there are very beautiful scenes really moving especially, one advances in this movie and the final scenes are magnificent of power. A strong movie in every respect

Berlin, 1940. Working class couple Otto and Anna Quangel receive the news that their only son has lost his life in the battlefield and decide to resist the Nazi regime in their very own way. Soon the Gestapo is hunting "the threat". Although the performances of Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson are very good it's not enough to hold a movie that is simply bland and just the same old, same old kind of story plus some pretty good actors are going wasted and as usual Daniel Brühl and even Rosemary Harris that for some reason is not mentioned here but overall very disappointing movie with some pretty great and talented actors. (5/10)