The freshman effort of writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (say that fast five times) is a familiar story: Boy joins the GDR stasi (East Germany and the seceret police), falls in love with spying on people and torturing capitalists, becomes a professor, gets assigned an important field job years later, begins to feel sorry for his assignment, turns in their favor, and ultimately has to decide which side he is on. A tale as old as time. More generally, it is about decisions, consequences, trust, and privacy.

We first meet Captain Weisler (Ulrich Muhe) as a professor. In a chilling opening scene, he shows his students the best way to obtain information from someone who doesn't want to give it. He plays back a tape of himself asking a suspect the same question over and over for hours without sleep, food, or water. When a student says that this is cruel he puts a mark next to his name on the attendance sheet. Thus, we are introduced to Captain Weisler, a badass socialist spying machine with no love for or allegiance to anyone but the GDR.

We also meet Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who is quite suspicious of playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Dreyman writes loyal socialist plays about the joys of factory work and love of state, but Hempf has a sneaking suspicion about his values (not really — he just wants to bone his girlfriend). Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), a former peer of Wiesler who has since been elevated to lieutenant, is asked to find something on Dreyman. As you may have guessed, he goes to Wiesler to lead the surviellance.

It turns out that Dreyman really is as neutral as he seems to be, much to the discontent of his revolutionary, box-shaped emo-glasses wearing friends. Hempf pushes for something which Dreyman can be detained for and luck comes their way when the death of a friend inspires Dreyman to write an anti-GDR article for a West German periodical.

What follows is a thriller of sorts, tense in some parts and apathetic in others. The movie's strength lies in its writing and acting.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has a great script here; original, well thought out, witty, and unpredictable. The cast of characters is rich and the story intriguing. We have a story from the past with direct ties to the future given the dissolution of personal freedoms in our own country.