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From 1950 until the Wall came down, the East German Ministry for State Security--cutesified to "Stasi"--spied on suspected enemies of socialism. Through an extensive web of informants, the Stasi created a society steeped in surveillance on a scale that wasn't completely revealed until the files were made public after reunification. So far, movies about life in the GDR, such as Goodbye Lenin, tended to be bittersweet satires.

With his award-winning and Oscar-nominated The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck takes a hard look at a country where a mind-boggling one in fifty citizens spied on the rest.

Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe) is one of the elite Stasi officers who have turned around-the-clock surveillance into an academic discipline. When we first meet him, he lectures eager students about the fine points of interrogation. Students who ask critical questions are--natuerlich!--marked as suspicious. A true believer, Wiesler is tapped by his cynical superiors to dig up dirt on a successful playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch): "our only non-subversive writer who's still being read in the West."

Listening in on the intimate details of Dreyman's bohemian life from his surveillance post in the attic, Wiesler soon learns the real reason for the operation: Dreyman's girlfriend, the star actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), is having an affair with a high-ranking GDR minister, and Wiesler is being used to get the loyal but inconvenient playwright out of the way.

Wiesler, whose own ascetic life is circumscribed by tomato sauce from a tube and grotesque Stasi prostitutes, can't help but empathize with the artists he is spying on. At the same time, Dreyman, stung into action by the suicide of a friend, begins to doubt his convenient acquiescence to the socialist system.

The ensuing tragedy of double-crossed loyalties develops in authentically drab colors, in streets and pubs that are perpetually empty of life, pleasure, cars, people, and laughter. Plattenbauten projects can be seen rising even behind the cemeteries where blacklisted artists find their final resting place. With first-rate actors and faithful production design, von Donnersmark brings the large and small betrayals of the doomed republic to paranoia-inducing life.

In the final analysis, the film's conclusion strikes a note that is somewhat too conciliatory. There is no doubt, however, that von Donnersmark made a gripping drama that vividly evokes a quickly-receding historical reality and, at the same time, provides a timely lesson about the costs--on all sides--of a system that runs roughshod over its citizens' civil liberties.