The Lives of Others [Blu-ray]

Made on a shoestring budget of $2 million, The Lives of Others is the most suspenseful psychological thriller I've seen in a long time, ranking with Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. What's more, it presents one of the strongest pro-individual, anti-collectivist themes of any movie I've ever seen--all the more surprising because it hails from, of all places, Germany.Its key lies in its title, which seems at first glance drippingly altruistic. The year, appropriately, is 1984, and Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is in his twentieth year as an agent of East Germany's dreaded Ministry for State Security, commonly known as "Stasi." The "shield and sword" of the Socialist Unity Party, 100,000 Stasi agents and 200,000 paid informers hold the small Soviet satellite nation in a death grip, monitoring and controlling the lives of its 17 million citizens.Captain Wiesler is a meticulous interrogator, ruthlessly wearing down suspects until they confess. An instructor at the Stasi academy, he trains future agents always to be on guard. "The best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation," he instructs his students. "The enemies of the state are arrogant. Remember that. "A humorlessly menacing man, Wiesler leads a lonely, Spartan existence in an antiseptic, sparsely furnished apartment in a concrete high-rise that houses many fellow agents. One day at the academy, his former classmate and current boss, gregarious Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), drops in with an assignment right up Wiesler's alley. One of their artists appears to be straying from the flock, and Wiesler has been assigned to watch him. However, the subject in question is no dissident, but the most celebrated playwright in East Germany, Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch)--a citizen so loyal to the Party that he believes his is "the greatest country on earth."Later that evening, spying from a balcony seat with opera glasses, Wiesler detects the mark of subversiveness on Dreymann's face as he watches the actors onstage performing his play. As Georg beams with proprietary approval, rising to applaud, Wiesler quietly utters to himself a one-word indictment that seals the dramatist's fate: "Arrogant."Georg lives with longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck)--a radiant brunette who is as celebrated an actress as Georg is a writer (and to whom Wiesler clearly takes a fancy). While they are out of their flat, Wiesler's technical team descends upon their home, bugging the place. "Operation Lazlo" is now in full swing, and Wiesler and his partner monitor their subjects around the clock from the apartment building's empty attic.At first, the surveillance of Georg and Christa appears fruitless. At a dinner party they host, a hysterical theatrical colleague (Hans-Uwe Bauer), who's suffered detention and psychological torture at Berlin's infamous Hohenschönhausen prison, accuses another director of being a Stasi informer. Georg is quick to defend the man against the accusation.Yet, through the course of his work, Wiesler makes some rather ugly discoveries about the investigation. He learns that it was ordered at the behest of national Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), a porcine bureaucrat who's extorted sexual favors from Christa under the threat of blacklisting her. Wiesler also eventually finds his friend Grubitz's schmoozing to be a cover for vicious social climbing and discovers that Grubitz is complicit with Hempf's scheme to use Stasi as a cat's paw to eliminate Georg, his romantic rival.Within Wiesler stirs a realization previously kept repressed: that his unquestioning faith in his country has enabled not his ideal of the perfect socialist state, but the hideous arrogance of avaricious thugs who run everything in the "workers' utopia."Where once was the heel-clicking impersonality of a robot, a conscience begins to grow. Wiesler comes to view Georg and Christa and their circle of bohemian friends not as specimens under a microscope, but as real individuals, with hopes and dreams, loves and heartbreaks. Having grown a conscience, he soon also yearns for a heart, as he silently assesses the utter emptiness of his own life.Swept up in his subjects' personal lives, Wiesler's detached spying turns into voyeurism. But it isn't a perverted voyeurism, because, for the first time, the lonely captain catches a glimpse into a world of beauty, poetry, and music that is alien to his two-dimensional existence. Sympathetic to the predicament of these enemies of the state, Wiesler begins covering for them, faking his reports, and remaining silent about Georg's gradual disillusionment with the DDR after an old director friend (Volkmar Kleinert) commits suicide.He overhears an argument in which Georg confronts Christa with knowledge of her affair with Hempf. Christa--already insecure about her talent--explains that she fears being blacklisted if she breaks it off. Wiesler feels compelled to protect her: He accidentally-on-purpose runs into her in a bar, pretending to be a fan, and tells her that her performances have inspired him. "Many people love you for who you are," he says, sincerely. "You are even more yourself onstage than you are in real life."Christa dismisses his compliment, telling Wiesler he can't really know her. "Did you know that I would sell myself for art?" she asks. "But you already have art," he counters. "That would be a bad deal; you're a great artist."Though his simple compassion, he gives Christa the strength to believe in herself and renounce her extorted affair with Hempf. But in doing so, Wiesler unintentionally sets into motion a nail-biting series of events that leads inexorably both to tragedy and redemption.The Lives of Others is a superb film, top-drawer in every regard. Cathartic and ennobling, it recalls Fahrenheit 451 and We the Living in its presentation of tragic heroes forced to examine their deepest-held yet deeply mistaken principles. Hagen Bogdanski's cinematography is compelling; through subtle differences in lighting he gives Silke Buhr's sets an additional dimension that places the characters in emotional context. Shot with tungsten-balanced film, Georg and Christa's incandescently-lit apartment radiates warmth; yet by capturing with daylight film the omnipresent, fluorescent-lit settings of the Stasi world, Bogdanski renders it cold and bloodless. Gabriel Yared's simple, haunting soundtrack is the perfect evocative counterpart for the action onscreen.The acting is realistic, but never naturalistic. Martina Gedeck is a pleasure to watch, not merely because of her physical beauty, but for her impressive emotional range. Ulrich Tukur's capacity to turn on a dime from regular guy to cold-blooded manipulator is simply scary. And Sebastian Koch combines a physically imposing presence with a gentle, almost fatherly manner, reminding me of a younger Rutger Hauer.But Ulrich Mühe steals the show as Wiesler. I have never seen an actor convey such a broad range of feelings within such narrow parameters. Where a Pacino or a Steiger would explode with ferocity, Mühe underplays, moving the audience with the sudden shift of an eyebrow, the drawing-in of a cheek muscle, or the quiet fall of a teardrop that betrays his sphinx-like façade.Mühe began his acting career in communist East Germany. When government records were opened to the public after German reunification, he learned that his actress wife had been informing on him to the Stasi during the entire six years of their marriage. Clearly, he drew upon this reservoir of traumatic betrayal for this role.The Lives of Others is flawlessly crafted, completely engaging the heart and mind. Most impressive is the fact that it's Henckel von Donnersmarck's feature film debut, released while he was still at the relatively young age of 32. In a recent interview, von Donnersmarck--who saw life behind the Iron Curtain first-hand when he visited family in East Germany as a child--spelled out his thoughts on communist repression as well as independent filmmaking:"The [phrase] 'Independent film' makes sense to me only if it means that the director has full artistic control. How could a film be independent otherwise? ... I know that very well from East Germany: Until the Wall came down, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had Final Cut on everything: novels, plays, films, even paintings. Make no mistake: hardly ever did they actually censor anything. But looking back at the art of those four decades, you can still feel the state in everything, and most of the art of that era is very impersonal and boring. Because the artists censored themselves, often without knowing it."Imagine my surprise, then, when the PC crowd at the recent Academy Awards ceremony--who feted environmental scam-artist Al Gore for his global warming crock-umentary--also bestowed the Best Foreign Language Film award upon The Lives of Others, rather than upon heavily favored Pan's Labyrinth. (I think Lives deserved the nod for Best Motion Picture overall, but I'm not unhappy that the Academy gave that award to director Martin Scorsese's The Departed, a consolation prize for snubbing him so many years.)This cinematic masterpiece is a cause for celebration. Rarely has a filmmaker burst on the scene in such total command of his material. As a directorial debut, The Lives of Others belongs in the same company as Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. I can only hope that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has a Touch of Evil yet to come.

Made on a shoestring budget of $2 million, The Lives of Others is the most suspenseful psychological thriller I've seen in a long time, ranking with Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. What's more, it presents one of the strongest pro-individual, anti-collectivist themes of any movie I've ever seen--all the more surprising because it hails from, of all places, Germany.Its key lies in its title, which seems at first glance drippingly altruistic. The year, appropriately, is 1984, and Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is in his twentieth year as an agent of East Germany's dreaded Ministry for State Security, commonly known as "Stasi." The "shield and sword" of the Socialist Unity Party, 100,000 Stasi agents and 200,000 paid informers hold the small Soviet satellite nation in a death grip, monitoring and controlling the lives of its 17 million citizens.Captain Wiesler is a meticulous interrogator, ruthlessly wearing down suspects until they confess. An instructor at the Stasi academy, he trains future agents always to be on guard. "The best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation," he instructs his students. "The enemies of the state are arrogant. Remember that. "A humorlessly menacing man, Wiesler leads a lonely, Spartan existence in an antiseptic, sparsely furnished apartment in a concrete high-rise that houses many fellow agents. One day at the academy, his former classmate and current boss, gregarious Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), drops in with an assignment right up Wiesler's alley. One of their artists appears to be straying from the flock, and Wiesler has been assigned to watch him. However, the subject in question is no dissident, but the most celebrated playwright in East Germany, Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch)--a citizen so loyal to the Party that he believes his is "the greatest country on earth."Later that evening, spying from a balcony seat with opera glasses, Wiesler detects the mark of subversiveness on Dreymann's face as he watches the actors onstage performing his play. As Georg beams with proprietary approval, rising to applaud, Wiesler quietly utters to himself a one-word indictment that seals the dramatist's fate: "Arrogant."Georg lives with longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck)--a radiant brunette who is as celebrated an actress as Georg is a writer (and to whom Wiesler clearly takes a fancy). While they are out of their flat, Wiesler's technical team descends upon their home, bugging the place. "Operation Lazlo" is now in full swing, and Wiesler and his partner monitor their subjects around the clock from the apartment building's empty attic.At first, the surveillance of Georg and Christa appears fruitless. At a dinner party they host, a hysterical theatrical colleague (Hans-Uwe Bauer), who's suffered detention and psychological torture at Berlin's infamous Hohenschönhausen prison, accuses another director of being a Stasi informer. Georg is quick to defend the man against the accusation.Yet, through the course of his work, Wiesler makes some rather ugly discoveries about the investigation. He learns that it was ordered at the behest of national Culture Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), a porcine bureaucrat who's extorted sexual favors from Christa under the threat of blacklisting her. Wiesler also eventually finds his friend Grubitz's schmoozing to be a cover for vicious social climbing and discovers that Grubitz is complicit with Hempf's scheme to use Stasi as a cat's paw to eliminate Georg, his romantic rival.Within Wiesler stirs a realization previously kept repressed: that his unquestioning faith in his country has enabled not his ideal of the perfect socialist state, but the hideous arrogance of avaricious thugs who run everything in the "workers' utopia."Where once was the heel-clicking impersonality of a robot, a conscience begins to grow. Wiesler comes to view Georg and Christa and their circle of bohemian friends not as specimens under a microscope, but as real individuals, with hopes and dreams, loves and heartbreaks. Having grown a conscience, he soon also yearns for a heart, as he silently assesses the utter emptiness of his own life.Swept up in his subjects' personal lives, Wiesler's detached spying turns into voyeurism. But it isn't a perverted voyeurism, because, for the first time, the lonely captain catches a glimpse into a world of beauty, poetry, and music that is alien to his two-dimensional existence. Sympathetic to the predicament of these enemies of the state, Wiesler begins covering for them, faking his reports, and remaining silent about Georg's gradual disillusionment with the DDR after an old director friend (Volkmar Kleinert) commits suicide.He overhears an argument in which Georg confronts Christa with knowledge of her affair with Hempf. Christa--already insecure about her talent--explains that she fears being blacklisted if she breaks it off. Wiesler feels compelled to protect her: He accidentally-on-purpose runs into her in a bar, pretending to be a fan, and tells her that her performances have inspired him. "Many people love you for who you are," he says, sincerely. "You are even more yourself onstage than you are in real life."Christa dismisses his compliment, telling Wiesler he can't really know her. "Did you know that I would sell myself for art?" she asks. "But you already have art," he counters. "That would be a bad deal; you're a great artist."Though his simple compassion, he gives Christa the strength to believe in herself and renounce her extorted affair with Hempf. But in doing so, Wiesler unintentionally sets into motion a nail-biting series of events that leads inexorably both to tragedy and redemption.The Lives of Others is a superb film, top-drawer in every regard. Cathartic and ennobling, it recalls Fahrenheit 451 and We the Living in its presentation of tragic heroes forced to examine their deepest-held yet deeply mistaken principles. Hagen Bogdanski's cinematography is compelling; through subtle differences in lighting he gives Silke Buhr's sets an additional dimension that places the characters in emotional context. Shot with tungsten-balanced film, Georg and Christa's incandescently-lit apartment radiates warmth; yet by capturing with daylight film the omnipresent, fluorescent-lit settings of the Stasi world, Bogdanski renders it cold and bloodless. Gabriel Yared's simple, haunting soundtrack is the perfect evocative counterpart for the action onscreen.The acting is realistic, but never naturalistic. Martina Gedeck is a pleasure to watch, not merely because of her physical beauty, but for her impressive emotional range. Ulrich Tukur's capacity to turn on a dime from regular guy to cold-blooded manipulator is simply scary. And Sebastian Koch combines a physically imposing presence with a gentle, almost fatherly manner, reminding me of a younger Rutger Hauer.But Ulrich Mühe steals the show as Wiesler. I have never seen an actor convey such a broad range of feelings within such narrow parameters. Where a Pacino or a Steiger would explode with ferocity, Mühe underplays, moving the audience with the sudden shift of an eyebrow, the drawing-in of a cheek muscle, or the quiet fall of a teardrop that betrays his sphinx-like façade.Mühe began his acting career in communist East Germany. When government records were opened to the public after German reunification, he learned that his actress wife had been informing on him to the Stasi during the entire six years of their marriage. Clearly, he drew upon this reservoir of traumatic betrayal for this role.The Lives of Others is flawlessly crafted, completely engaging the heart and mind. Most impressive is the fact that it's Henckel von Donnersmarck's feature film debut, released while he was still at the relatively young age of 32. In a recent interview, von Donnersmarck--who saw life behind the Iron Curtain first-hand when he visited family in East Germany as a child--spelled out his thoughts on communist repression as well as independent filmmaking:"The [phrase] 'Independent film' makes sense to me only if it means that the director has full artistic control. How could a film be independent otherwise? ... I know that very well from East Germany: Until the Wall came down, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat had Final Cut on everything: novels, plays, films, even paintings. Make no mistake: hardly ever did they actually censor anything. But looking back at the art of those four decades, you can still feel the state in everything, and most of the art of that era is very impersonal and boring. Because the artists censored themselves, often without knowing it."Imagine my surprise, then, when the PC crowd at the recent Academy Awards ceremony--who feted environmental scam-artist Al Gore for his global warming crock-umentary--also bestowed the Best Foreign Language Film award upon The Lives of Others, rather than upon heavily favored Pan's Labyrinth. (I think Lives deserved the nod for Best Motion Picture overall, but I'm not unhappy that the Academy gave that award to director Martin Scorsese's The Departed, a consolation prize for snubbing him so many years.)This cinematic masterpiece is a cause for celebration. Rarely has a filmmaker burst on the scene in such total command of his material. As a directorial debut, The Lives of Others belongs in the same company as Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. I can only hope that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has a Touch of Evil yet to come.

As an American, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Germany’s wonderful (but very limited/small) movie industry. This is not only my favorite German movie, nor my favorite foreign language, but actually one of my top 10 or 20 favorites movies of all time.It uses nuance and detail in such an innovative and pragmatic way that it’s impossible not to empathize with nearly every character in the film. The story line is also awesome. This is a touchy subject and though the film makes its opinion on the matter pretty clear, it makes sure to give an honest and human character to the side it effectively rails against during the movie. I enjoy the occasional comedic relief; in fact my only criticism would be that there were opportunities to include more of them. Perhaps most importantly, the performance by the 3 leading actors was stellar. It’s also one of the movies that gets better the more you watch it 😂 9/10

Needed to write about this movie for a school assignment. It was a good watch

I spent some time in East Germany in the 1960's. This was a very difficult place to live at that time, and this movie let's you feel this. I also loved the ending of the story.

Great plot with amazing ending. This is a must see especially if you like Cold War history and 1984 type stories. Top 20 must see movies.

I've put off watching this in spite of it being on my watchlist for quite some time. I might have been put off because I figured it would be too slow and not have a dramatic pulse. Wrong, it was absolutely fantatstiic. It was riveting and keeps you engaged with the plot, dialogue, staging, etc. Watch it.

This Lives of Others is a brilliant film, it shows how the East German security service commonly known as the Stasi, kept the citizens of the DDR under observation in various ways, for example by bugging apartments, phones and reading the mail of "undesirable" elliments, indeed the East Germans relied on informants, both paid and unpaid to spy on their family, friends and aquaintances and in "The Lives of Others" one of these informants commits suicide by stepping into the path of an on comming truck, fearining that her betrayal would be reveald.The film is set in 1984, and it's central character, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (played by Ulrich Muche) is tasked with the survailance of a disident playwright, Georg Dreyman. The film follows the survailance, including the installation of listening divaces in his apartment and the death of the informant.I think the Lives of Others is so powerful because it was made by Germans and is in that language throughout (with English subtitles) and it covers a subject with all East Germans can identify. The film, although fiction shows how the state in real life controlled it's population by survailance and other means. I don't think the film would have been as powerful if it was given the "Hollywood Treatment" with a non-German cast or performed in English

This is a tremendously powerful film, & is now high on my list of favourites. I watched it twice in 48 hrs, & although I was profoundly moved by the first viewing, the second made even more of an impact, revealing nuances I hadnot fully appreciated originally.Earlier reviewers have praised the film eloquently, noting the superbly taut production values & mesmerising acting of the protagonists, as well as the pernicious logic & attention to detail of the GDR & not least, the small, redeeming moments of human goodness which make it so powerfully moving, so I will not further elaborate on these things.One thing that struck me: Weisler, the GDR officer at the core of the film, gradually finds his sympathies drawn towards the people he is spying on. But on my second viewing I saw it slightly differently. I believe his reason for suggesting surveillance was not unambivalently that he was suspicious, as he told his superior, but that from the moment he saw them in the theatre he was drawn to them. He has lead a lonely, narrow life, & it seems feasible to me that he experienced the first stirrings of a suppressed recognition or yearning as he gazed at the writer & actor at the end of the play, as they took their encores. He wanted to be them, or be like them.In effect & to use modern parlance, he began stalking them under the guise of surveillance, & unwittingly found himself more & more involved with them as a consequence.If you have not yet seen this film I urge you to do so. This is superlative cinema that you won't forget in a hurry.

The stars are for the film, not the DVD. The dvd quality is one star at best.I saw The Lives of Others back when it came out, and I really liked it. I wanted to watch it again, but couldn't find it streaming anywhere, and my library wanted to rent it to me for £1.60, so I figured I'd buy it for a few ££ more despite not having watched a physical DVD in nearly a decade.I know it's been a long time since I popped a DVD in, but I seem to recall being allowed to skip the stupid trailers and go directly to the menu. Unfortunately, with this dvd, we were forced to watch something like five trailers...Long story short, we hardened ourselves for our uphill journey through trailer after trailer and finally made it to the feature film. It holds up.As for the disc itself, it's pretty poor quality DVD, but given what I paid for it, I don't really care. After all, it's probably going to collect dust for another decade now.

In his debut feature, German auteur Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, has created a masterpiece of world cinema. It offers us a glimpse of life behind the Iron Curtain of communist East Germany, and the lengths the government went to keep tabs on its citizens. The films chronicles the slow transformation of a loyal officer of the Stasi (the East German secret police) and how his eavesdropping on a young couple leads him to reconsider his whole way of life.Officer Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe in a stellar performance) is a staunch supporter of the country's vile politics. He decides to bug the apartment of young artist Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his gorgeous girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) as he suspects them to be disloyal to the government. From an attic room, with headphones clamped to his ears, he becomes privy to their most intimate conversations. As time passes he slowly begins to realize the hollowness and sheer hypocrisy of the regime he has so faithfully served all his life. From being a listener he becomes the unseen participant in their lives, a kind of guardian angel, who saves their skins on more than one occasion. But as time goes and he turns up nothing that could nail the duo, his boss becomes impatient and sets into motion a series of events that lead to a startling denouement.The film opened to rave reviews and won a slew of awards. It was a Golden Globe nominee in 2007 and scooped up the Oscar for the best foreign language film the same year. See it, for Ulrich Muhe as the tortured soul whose larger-than-life performance, is the driving spirit behind this remarkable piece of cinema!

"The Lives of Others" is a fantastic film. One of the best I've seen in some time. The events depicted are horrible and tragic. But at the same time, bittersweet.This movie depicts life in East German in the early to mid 1980's, under the rule of a dictatorial state. The story follows the life of a man and his lover, as he becomes aware of just how bad things are. And the undercover police agent instructed to spy on the couple slowly realises that the social order he helps maintain is corrupt and evil.It's a brilliantly acted film, with a fascinating story. This is a social and political drama, based on what life was really like in the Eastern Bloc.This film is in German (with English sub-titles). The Blu-ray picture and sound quality is top notch.