Downfall

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Not only is this a riveting account of Hitler's final days, it shares something with other great German war movies of the past. Specifically, that dread of the underneath.

The great submarine movie Das Boot had it. The more recent Cold War East-to-West Berlin-escape drama The Tunnel had it in, er, spades.

And Downfall is infused with a subterranean claustrophobia all its own, generated by most of the action taking place in Hitler's bunker as the Russian Army envelops Berlin.

Quite aside from its vivid portrait of the Fuhrer in his last desperate days, it's a movie of stifling atmosphere. One where the concrete surrounds and harsh lighting make a fitting final asylum for those loyal enough to Hitler's madness to find their way into his inner sanctum.

It's a film largely told through the eyes of Traudl Junge (Lara), one of Hitler's young personal assistants who survived the war and was the subject of the 2002 documentary Hitler's Secretary, interview footage of which bookends this.

She's also there to make a point about what Hitler inspired in the German people and continued to inspire to the bitter end, even when - in frequent scenes depicted here - he was lambasting them for their failures to keep the Allies at bay.

That Hitler was allowed to happen by a complicit population is an idea that Downfall hammers home none too subtly.

That the film was made in Germany by Germans with director Hirschbiegel working from the script producer Bernd Eichinger based on Junge's memoirs and historian Joachim Fest's Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich speaks of an artistic bravery to confront the past. And that the film was embraced by the German box-office shows that the past is still very much on the country's mind.

Of course, it's also a spellbinding film, even if it does feel like it takes too long to say all it wants to say. The film doesn't finish with Hitler and Eva Braun's suicide and crude cremation but continues to follow his subordinates out into the rubble of the Third Reich.

We see the death of Josef Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) and his equally frightening wife (Corinna Harfouch), who after murdering their six children in the bunker rather than have them grow up in "a world without National Socialism", shoot themselves.

It stops short of showing the moment of Hitler and Braun's double suicide which, oddly, feels like a punch pulled. Having put his beloved dog to sleep, he and Braun slip away into his private quarters - and muffled shots are heard.

Then again, the just-married couple were the only witnesses to any famous last words between them, and Downfall strives throughout for authenticity right until its ending involving Junge and a boy earlier awarded the Iron Cross - the scene recalling the famous footage of Hitler's last appearance.

But Downfall wouldn't be the movie it is without the performance by Swiss-born actor Ganz as Hitler.

While that famous moustache has been the undoing of countless others playing Hitler, Ganz is mesmerising. He has the voice - it helps that he gets to do it in German - and he has the mania. His portrayal exudes a sense of what made Hitler such a compelling figure; he was, after all, just a man. A man who somehow managed to create the greatest horrors of the 20th century. This film won't make you hate him any less, but you might understand him just a little more.

CAST: Bruno Ganz, Juliane Köhler, Alexandra Maria Lara, Ulrich Noethen

DIRECTOR: Oliver Hirschbiegel

RATING: R13

RUNNING TIME: 149 mins

SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday