Downfall, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel from Bernd Eichinger's adaptation of the non-fiction books Inside Hitler's Bunker by Joachim C. Fest, and Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary by Traudl Junge, is a compendiously detailed re-enactment of the last days of the Third Reich as the Red Army closes in on Berlin, where Hitler and his entourage are hiding out in a bunker complex below the devastation and chaos of the bombarded city. Though his staff beg him to leave Berlin before the Russians arrive, with the idea that he'll negotiate some ongoing, compromised form of the National Socialist regime, Hitler staunchly refuses--he'll fall with the Reich. His attitude still varies widely, however: sometimes he rousingly predicts victory and gives orders to move nonexistent troops in the city's defense; sometimes he bellows in outrage at the treachery he believes has brought defeat and vilifies the German people for proving to be too weak to carry out his vision; with equal obliviousness he hands out official appointments to now-meaningless posts (e.g., head of the Luftwaffe) and orders arrests and executions of key officials (the latter of which can be effected if his henchmen can get their hands on the offender).

Bruno Ganz's portrayal of Hitler is quite exact, as uncanny as Jamie Foxx's impersonation of Ray Charles, but with alarming, spasmodic surges of violent emotion. At the same time, the Hitler of Downfall is necessarily impersonal. After all, it's hard to imagine what purpose a psychologically nuanced account of Hitler would serve. The effects of his character were magnified in world events to such an extent that it wouldn't get us very far to approach him as a realistic fictional character, that is, as the individual product of a certain psychological make-up and experience, someone we could imaginably behave like if similarly constituted and situated. Hitler is entirely too "individual" for realism. And in movies, abnormal psychology, which doesn't offer the audience a point of identification, can really only be observed. In any case, however Hitler got the way he was, all he has left in Downfall is the increasingly futile display of his larger-than-life public persona and, finally, annihilation on his own terms.

The high-ranking ministers and soldiers around Hitler, who for years have been helping him run the Reich into the ground and lose the war, are now second-guessing him behind his back, and the movie cuts to them outside the bunker as they speculate about the Russian victory and decide what to do. The intercutting between the bunker and the outside world that this permits is, in fact, the subject of the movie, not Hitler himself. He's gone an hour before the movie ends but the disaster he set in motion is unstoppable. The point of the movie's dramatic recreation, then, is to show how even when he was ludicrously powerless, even after he was dead, Hitler's madness rippled out of the bunker and continued harming the Germans.