DOWNFALL is a German account of Hitler's last 12 days in the Berlin Bunker, translated into 155 minutes in the Nazi nuthouse.

This is the inside track, as it were, on his downfall, based on two books: Joachim Fest's Inside Hitler's Bunker and the memoirs of Traudl Junge, the last stenographer appointed by the Fuhrer to his team of pretty young secretaries.

It is her fly-on-the-wall account of the Nazi dictator's final curtain in his claustrophobic bunker that gives the film its voice: caught up in the maelstrom yet morally removed from its epicentre.

Director Oliver Hirschbiegel is in no hurry: this is a film of slow, tortuous strangulation and dying embers, painstaking in its minutiae and filmed in the manner of a documentary dramatisation. You can feel the oxygen shrinking as Hitler's world crumbles with Speer and Goebbels and all the suspects gathered around him, at war with each other as the Fuhrer loses his grip.

There is no cinematic excess here; the cast may be considerable in size but nothing is epic in the manner of a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy; these are rats trapped in a sewer, faced with meeting their maker, and rather than the grand final speeches of a play, these men say goodbye in letters, defiant and self-justifying to the last.

At the outset it felt inappropriate to judge Bruno Ganz's central performance as Hitler within the standard parameters of cinema criticism. However, it is a remarkable performance, not only in his eerie physical mannerisms but also in his ability to convey all the contradictions of this man and monster at his self-destructive end.

Hirschbiegel's haunted film brings flesh and blood to Hitler without giving him humanity, and so it is a release to leave behind the Nazi poison, even if the ending offers the one concession to post-war German feelings of rebirth and lessons learnt.

Updated: 16:12 Thursday, April 14, 2005