Diane Kruger picked up a best actress award at last year’s Cannes film festival for her powerhouse performance in Fatih Akin’s knotty Hamburg-set thriller, originally entitled Aus dem Nichts (Out of Nowhere). Kruger is at the centre of almost every scene and her transition from tattooed bride to grieving victim and avenging angel dominates the drama. Focusing closely on Kruger’s subtly changing features, Akin, who earned international awards with films such as 2004’s Head-On and 2007’s The Edge of Heaven, makes the most of Kruger’s ability to convey fierce inner torment; steeliness mixed with vulnerability. It’s a mercurial performance, subtly modulated, and somewhat at odds with an increasingly melodramatic potboiler that flirts uneasily with the pulpy conventions of vengeance-fuelled B-movies.
Kruger plays Katja, an independent spirit devoted to her young son, Rocco (Rafael Santana), and his Kurdish father, Nuri (Numan Acar), whom she married while he was still serving time for drug-dealing. When an explosion rips through the Turkish neighbourhood office where Nuri works as a translator and adviser, the police suspect his former drug connections are the key, presuming the perpetrators to be “Turkish mafia, Kurdish mafia, Albanians…” Yet the truth lies closer to home, leaving Katja to confront both the leering spectre of German neo-Nazism and the more insidious tortures of a cruelly civilised legal system.
While film-makers from Roger Corman to Larry Cohen have used “torn from the headlines” stories to fire their quickie exploitation pictures, Akin, who was born in Germany to Turkish parents, says he was inspired by the scandalous response to a string of German xenophobic crimes (the National Socialist Underground murders) in which “police focused their investigation on the people within the community of the victims”. Reuniting with Goodbye Berlin co-writer Hark Bohm, whose legal expertise is to the fore in courtroom scenes, he paints a lurid picture of a society in which victims are criminalised while evildoers are protected. I struggle to remember a more reptilian screen presence than In the Fade’s defence lawyer, Haberbeck, demonically brought to life by Johannes Krisch. By contrast, Katja’s lawyer, Danilo (Denis Moschitto), is a loyal advocate whose growing sense of moral outrage seems to count against him in court.
More affecting are the thumbnail portraits of Katja’s extended family turning on each other as grief becomes embittered hostility: “What did your husband turn you into?” demands Katja’s mother, while Nuri’s parents whisper that tragedy could have been averted “if you’d taken better care”. It’s an accusation echoed in court, where Katja and her dead husband are demonised as drug addicts, unworthy of justice.
Justice is indeed one of the chapter headings that heavily signpost the drama, interspersed by fades to black and fragments of family smartphone footage recalling happier times. Cinematographer Rainer Klausmann mirrors the shifting tone, moving from the raggedy handheld footage of the first act into the more choreographed glides of the courtroom scenes, replete with Vertigo-style dolly zooms. Musical cues by Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age (their album track provides the film’s English-language title) are sparsely used at first, leaving plenty of awkward silences amid the stilted conversations, broken up by abrasive ambient sounds. More than once the film downshifts into semi slow-motion to crank up the tension.
It’s weirdly generic and oddly uneven fare, occupying a strange netherworld between Michael Winner’s notorious Death Wish and Kelly Reichardt’s underrated Night Moves. All the more impressive therefore that Kruger (the multilingual co-star of Troy and Inglourious Basterds, here sinking her teeth into a long-awaited German-speaking lead role) invests her antiheroine with such resonant individuality. There’s nothing off-the-peg about Katja’s character; we believe in her life, her trauma, her fallibilities and, most important, her pain. Somehow, she holds it all together even as the drama around her succumbs to overwrought cliche.
The film may be no masterpiece but Kruger’s intensity ensures it retains a core emotional resonance. Quite how In the Fade managed to beat such superior films as Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless and Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman to the Golden Globe for foreign language film is a mystery, but the inarguable power of Kruger’s performance remains an open-and-shut case.
