The Wave

A school teacher discusses types of government with his class. His students find it too boring to repeatedly go over national socialism and believe that dictatorship cannot be established in modern Germany. He starts an experiment to show how easily the masses can become manipulated.

German critics were sharply divided on almost every front except the performances, which drew consistent praise — Jürgen Vogel's morally ambiguous teacher and a breakout turn from a teenage Frederick Lau were near-universal highlights. The real argument was over whether the film earns its dramatic premise: detractors found the characters thinly sketched stereotypes, the students' slide into conformity unconvincing in a modern West German setting, and the whole enterprise too tidily pedagogical, while defenders saw the very same schematic quality as deliberate and necessary. The staging drew its own split, with some finding it excitingly rough-edged genre filmmaking and others dismissing it as TV-procedural conventionality.