It's rather easy to see how this won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars: a humane film which invests all kinds of hope in one of the most coldly robotic systems this side of the Third Reich - it's one of the first films to take seriously the Stasi and its systematic deculturisation of the GRU before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And, to be fair, von Donnersmarck's debut feature (brave in concept, inadequate in execution) conjures an effectively cold and brutish sense of social terror, in its dull, sparse cinematography and flat overall visual texture, and in some of the incidents shown early on, in which Stasi agents rig an apartment with surveillance and a spying neighbour is threatened into secrecy. But, for all that, it's a dissatisfyingly ordinary film which pushes two characters to the core of the narrative when it would have perhaps been best to tell the tale of one: in showing the triumph over adversity arc of the quarry (individual persistence against the system), it shows the eventual sympathising of the agent spying on him... a most unlikely fiction, and a pleasantly annoying one, too. There's little in the way of self-reflexivity, and for a film all to do with spying and intrusions of privacy, it probably should be, really. Oddly, for a film more interested in characters than in the way they're presented to us, the suicide of a main player late on rings unusually cold - a sure sign that the narrative focus has been muddled and the emotional core empty. The coda is almost laughable.