Sophie Scholl - The Final Days begins with the jovial refrains of Billie Holiday's Candy from the radio, and ends with the screech of guillotine blades. The contrast couldn't be sharper. And what could be a more apt summary of the demise of Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch), a university student convicted and beheaded five days after her arrest for distributing anti-Hitler pamphlets at school?

Director Marc Rothemund's decision to book- end Scholl's rapidly unravelling existence in such drastically different circumstances reflects his gritty, unsentimental approach in The Final Days. His matter-of-fact reconstruction of Scholl's interrogation and internment by the Gestapo - all based on official transcriptions and accounts from eye witnesses - goes hand in hand with the film's harsh hues.

Although The Final Days has all the stuff of a political thriller - particularly when Scholl and her brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) undertake their fatal, last mission as members of the clandestine resistance group White Rose, filling school corridors and atriums with anti-Nazi flyers - Rothemund's piece is, like Oliver Hirschbiegel's Hitler film Downfall, essentially an intense psychological drama.

The film never leaves Sophie, documenting her struggle with the authorities and also with her own anxiety and self-doubts. The core of the film remains her battle of wits and words with her interrogation officer, Robert Mohr (Gerald Alexander Held), a career cop who is visibly shaken by Sophie's steely will even in the face of death.

The absence of melodrama in The Final Days only adds to the film's poignancy. Whereas other films might apply histrionics in the trial scene, which pitches Sophie against the obnoxious 'blood judge' Roland Freisler (a flaming turn by Andre Hennicke), The Final Days limits the acerbic exchanges to a minimum, the most dramatic being Sophie's pronouncement that, one day, it will be the Nazis' heads that will roll.

Anchoring The Final Days is an excellent performance by Jentsch, who captures Sophie's torment and the weight she took on her shoulders for her beliefs.