Film review: shadows on the wall

Starring: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld
Director: Christian Petzold
Category: IIA (German)

It's nearly 25 years since the Berlin Wall came down and German reunification was achieved. But stories, some of them very chilling, continue to be told about the kind of uneasy lives that some people led in then German Democratic Republic.

The eponymous protagonist of Christian Petzold's Barbara is an east Berlin doctor banished to a provincial backwater by the authorities for having had the temerity to apply for an exit visa to venture to the other side of the Iron Curtain.

First incarcerated, and then effectively sent into internal exile, Dr Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss) is assigned work in a spartan hospital and to live in a soulless apartment guaranteed to lower most people's morale.

And as is made patently clear in the early scenes of this involving psychological drama-cum-character study set in the 1980s, the film's heroine is very aware that she remains under constant surveillance by the East German secret police (Stasi).