Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.
Alone in Berlin is a respectable but somewhat stiff adaptation of Hans Fallada's novel. The true story of the Quangels offers inherent moral weight, and Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson bring genuine conviction to their roles, though the English-language casting in a German wartime setting creates an odd dissonance. The cinematography is competent and period-appropriate without being visually distinctive. The narrative, while based on a remarkable real act of quiet resistance, unfolds in a fairly procedural, by-the-numbers manner that drains some of the tension — the cat-and-mouse dynamic with the Gestapo never fully ignites. The ending, faithful to the tragic historical outcome, feels somewhat flat and anticlimactic rather than devastating. As a WWII resistance drama it hits familiar beats, and the film fails to distinguish itself from similar genre entries despite its extraordinary source material.