The Wave

The Wave is a very interesting film about a social experiment that gets out of hand. It addresses the power of mass hysteria and the dangers of the agentic state. It is set in a German high school and is based on the actual events of the same sort of social experiment, orignally done in 1960s California. The direction of the film is good and the narrative is concise. However, I would argue setting it in Germany (the place where the Nazi atrocities the film addresses happened), is a little obvious and might have more impact to show it in a setting disassociated with the topic to the viewer. I have also been led to believe the ending is not the same as what actually happened and feel it would have been interesting to see the reality, although obviously creative licence exists to make films more watchable and so was not necessarily a bad thing. (In German with English subltitles.)