A-List: Best Modern Spy Movies
By J. Don Birnam
July 28, 2016
2. The Lives of Others (2006)
It’s with a lot of bitter regret that I place the 2006 Best Foreign Language winner from Germany on the second spot of this list.
But the neo-noir spy movie made in Germany about East Germany reminds us of a topic that was beginning to bubble in 2006 and that is chillingly timely today: spying on each other. Where the new Jason Bourne movie plays fast and loose with government espionage and surveillance, this movie reminds us the all-too-real costs of it happening, even at a time of far less technological ability.
In case you don’t know, the movie centers around a Stasi domestic spy in East Germany, tasked with surveilling his neighbors to make sure that they aren’t thinking of defecting, or worse. In an absolute creepy manner, he becomes infatuated with the sexual and sometimes rocky marriage of his younger neighbors. Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, if you will.
But the consequences for all of them are not what you think they’ll be - or perhaps they are, as the movie makes no effort to hide its somber, dark undertones. It is a German movie, after all.
The shocking and unexpected last few sequences feel like a horrific punch to the stomach, even if you’d already been lulled from disgust into oblivion. The basic point is that when the immense powers of invasion of privacy are turned against one another, we lose our humanity and our liberty, and risk losing a lot more.
Continued:
1
2
3
4
Print this column
