Since competing at Cannes with his debut short, Rien à dire (1999), acclaimed Swiss actor Vincent Perez has had a chequered time as a director. But, following Peau d'Ange (2002) and The Secret (2007), he seems set to reach his widest audience to date with Alone in Berlin, which has been adapted from the 1947 Hans Fallada novel, Every Man Dies Alone.

Written in 24 days during the last weeks of his life, this was one of the first anti-fascist stories published after the war and drew on the Gestapo files of Otto and Elise Hampel, a working-class couple who had responded to the death of her brother during the push west in the spring of 1940 by conducting a postcard propaganda campaign against the Nazis. Initially reluctant to undertake the project, as he had remained in Germany and earned the opprobrium of exiles like Thomas Mann, Fallada was persuaded to research the topic by poet Johannes Becher, who knew that his drug-addicted friend (whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen) had been both incarcerated and institutionalised during the Third Reich.

During Fallada's lifetime, Frank Borzage filmed his classic account of the decline of the Weimar Republic, Little Man, What Now? (1934). But it wasn't until 1976 that Alfred Vohrer starred Hildegard Knef and Carl Raddatz in Everyone Dies Alone after television versions had appeared either side of the Berlin Wall in 1962 and 1970. Restricting the number of secondary characters (yet retaining the former fiancée and new husband of the central couple's dead son), this retelling makes Knef the instigator of the protest and heightens the suspense by having them argue their way out of a police station after they are identified by an eyewitness. But Perez and co-scenarist Achim von Borries play down the thriller aspects in a human drama designed to celebrate grassroots resistance at a time when the Internet has increased the potential for individual action to unprecedented levels.

Awaiting news of their son, Hans (Louis Hofmann), machinist Otto Quangel (Brendan Gleeson) and his wife, Anna (Emma Thompson), are crushed when postwoman Eva Kluge (Katrin Pollitt) delivers an official letter informing them of his death in the Ardennes. Anna tears up the paper, but tries to piece it back together again after being too distraught to do her daily shopping or make her house visits with the National Socialist Women's League. As a non-Party member, Otto also endures an awful day at work, as he is accused of not doing his bit to increase productivity. But he denounces the shirkers and avers that no one can question his loyalty, as he has given his only child to the cause.

That night, he changes the word `Führer' to `Lügner' (meaning `liar') in one of Hans's patriotic books and decides to spread the message by creating a series of postcards containing anti-Nazi slogans that he hopes will be passed between people to create a groundswell against the regime. Disguising his handwriting, he starts to scrawl, `Mothers, Hitler Will Kill Your Son Too', but he is interrupted when Jewish neighbour Frau Rosenthal (Monique Chaumette) knocks to inform her that crook Emil Barkhausen (Rainer Egger) is trying to steal from the belongings she has had to store in an upper room of their Berlin tenement block.

Kindly neighbour Herr Fromm (Joachim Bißmeier) hides Frau Rosenthal in his daughter's bedroom and warns her to stay put, as the authorities are becoming increasingly repressive towards the Jews. But, knowing that her husband is already dead and that she has nothing more to live for, she slips out just before Barkhausen snitches to the police and throws herself from an upper window to the horror of bar manager Persicke (Uwe Preuss) and his Hitler Youth son, Baldur (Sammy Scheuritzel), who had always enjoyed her apple cake. Returning from planting their first card on the steps of an official building, the Quangels are twitchy when Gestapo inspector Escherich (Daniel Brühl) comes to inspect the premises and allows Barkhausen to keep the watch he stole from the corpse in return for spying on his fellow residents.

When not writing postcards, Otto works on a bust of his fallen son. He purchases cards from shops across the city and wears thin cotton gloves as he writes to avoid leaving any telltale prints. However, Escherich agrees a wager with underling Zott (Daniel Sträßer) that people are too scared to circulate the cards and that the vast majority of them will fall into their hands. He is also sure that the perpetrator has recently lost a son at the front and orders Prall to run a check on Berlin's bereaved. But he suspects that their best chance of catching him will come when he makes a mistake.

As Otto makes coffins in his workshop and drops off the cards while walking the streets, Anna does her bit for the Women's League. She pays a visit to the imperious Claire Gehrich (Katarina Schüttler) in her large house and chastises her for not getting a worthwhile job. However, as her husband is a high-ranking officer, Gehrich lodges a complaint against Anna and colleagues Frau Busch (Imogen Kogge) and Ida Kuhn (Hildegard Schroedter) come to inform her that she has been relieved of her duties.

Feeling liberated, Otto and Anna ignore air-raid danger to place cards in more public buildings. He is nearly caught on one occasion (in a block burning a lot of lights during a supposed blackout), but Anna poses as a frightened mother looking for a lost child to enable her husband to slip away after the janitor spots him descending in the lift. Escherich fills his map with little red flags to mark each of the 129 deliveries. But he is no closer to unmasking the scribe he has dubbed the `Hobgoblin' and SS Officer Prall (Mikael Persbrandt) orders him to make an arrest or face the consequences.

One night, Otto asks Anna whether she thinks about what people do with their cards. He compares each one to a grain of sand stopping the smooth running of the war machine. But his frequent use of this word eventually dawns on Escherich, who has reached the conclusion that his quarry is a craftsman of mediocre intellect, but with an ordered mind. He has also narrowed down the tram routes that the culprit uses and swoops to make an arrest. Fearing Otto is in danger when she discovers he is absent from work, Anna scours the streets for him and is scared when Eva's estranged husband, Enno (Lars Rudolph) is bundled into the backseat of a black SS car. She pleads with Otto to reconsider their strategy, as she is convinced they are going to be caught. But, when he explains that they a team honouring the memory of their son, she kisses him and leads him into the bedroom (which is clearly something that doesn't happen very often).

Forced to let Enno go because his sons are both alive, Escherich is humiliated by Prall in front of his SS pals and given two days to eliminate Enno and put a stop to the Hobgoblin charade. Bleeding from a split lip after being slapped and thrown down the steps into the street, Escherich is determined to save face and forces Enno to commit suicide. Meanwhile, Anna nearly gets caught leaving a card in a local school, where she bumps into Hans's old classmate, Dietrich Necker (Jacob Matschenz). But, as the air-raids continue and refugees take to the roads with their belongings, the Quangels reach 285 cards and Escherich is close to a breakdown, as he knows Prall is on his case.

However, he finally gets the stroke of luck he has been waiting for. Otto fails to notice a hole in his coat pocket and two cards fall on to the workshop floor when he does an extra shift. He insists on them being handed into the Party official and Escherich quickly swoops to arrest him. Otto signs a confession and assures his captor that Anna had nothing to do with the campaign. But he is sceptical and bemused why the Quangels thought they would change anything - as only 18 cards were not voluntarily turned in by members of the public. Yet, he feels a qualm when Prall orders him to smash a celebratory glass on Otto's head after they torture him in the cells.

Fromm comes to court, where Otto and Anna are briefly able to hold hands in the dock and reassure each other they have done the right thing. He also visits Anna in prison, while Escherich asks Otto if there is anything he needs as he is being led to the guillotine. With scowling bravado, he asks for a card and a pen. But his nemesis proves an unlikely ally, as Escherich throws the 267 cards in his possession into the street before shooting himself in the head.

Suitably poignant and played with commendable restraint, this is a well-intentioned tribute to Otto and Elise Hampel. But, despite the excellence of Jean-Vincent Puzos's production design, it falls some way below the standards set by Marc Rothermund's Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) and Max Färberböck's A Woman in Berlin (2008). Christophe Beaucarne's camerawork is as discreet as Alexandre Desplat's score, but such vigilance prevents Perez from building up much suspense as the investigation continues. It hardly helps that the focus falls so heavily on the cat-and-mouse games between Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson and Daniel Brühl, as they are kept so rigorously apart and any chance of overlap or jeopardy is removed when the reprehensible Rainer Egger vanishes from the story the moment he is entrusting with snooping on his neighbours.

Perez capably conveys something of the patriotism and paranoia gripping the Wedding district of Berlin, but he offers little insight into the effect (if any) that the cards had on its residents. He also struggles to suggest the passage of time or to intimate the turning of the tide against the Nazis. Moreover, he and Von Borries try to cram too many incidental characters into the action, with the result that it becomes difficult to keep track of everyone, especially as so few have any tangible backstories. Another problem that goes unresolved is the clumsy bilingualism (printed matter is in German, while everyone speaks English) and the decision to have Gleeson, Thompson and Persbrandt adopt wavering accents. But authenticity matters less than sincerity here and, consequently, it's just about possible to forgive the crass climax. However, one can't help but wish that Perez had approached Fallada's text with a greater sense of fidelity and profundity.

Martin Zandvliet turns to a lesser-known aspect of the Second World War in Land of Mine. Some 2.2 million landmines were laid along the west coast of Denmark when the German High Command became convinced that Jutland was a potential target for an Allied invasion of the continent. However, when the war ended, the Danes defied the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention and coerced two thousand hapless POWs into risking life and limb in order to defuse and remove mines that had been placed in random patterns that had not always been recorded by the Wehrmacht sappers. As Denmark comes to terms with liberation in May 1945, paratroop sergeant Carl Leopold Rasmussen (Roland Møller) stops his Jeep on a coast road beside a marching convoy to beat up a defeated German trooper carrying a souvenir Danish flag. Speeding on, he arrives at a heavily mined beach and strides out boldly past the barbed wire to mark the area using black flags.

Rasmussen is under the command of Pioneer Corps lieutenant Ebbe Jensen (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), who greets a party of callow POWs with a lecture on why more mines were laid along the West Jutland coast than anywhere else in Europe. Beating the youths across the knuckles with his baton, he trains them to burrow 15-20 centimetres into the sand, unscrew the mine cap and remove the detonation fuse. He reminds them of the price to be paid for making mistakes before taking them to a remote bunker to practice with live mines. Some prove adept at the task, although one has to overcome his nerves before the last in the group perishes in the small circle of sandbags. The eleven survivors are dispatched to the spot delineated by Rasmussen, who greets them with thinly veiled contempt. Living across from the outhouse to which they have been billeted, widow Karin (Laura Bro) ushers her young daughter Elisabeth (Zoe Zandvliet) inside, as the recruits identify themselves as Hermann Marklein (Tim Bülow), Rodolf Selke (August Carter), Friedrich Schnurr (Alexander Rasch), Johann Wolff (Julius Kochinke), August Kluger (Maximilian Beck), twins Ernest (Emil Belton) and Werner Lessner (Oskar Belton), Wilhelm Lebern (Leon Seidel), Ludwig Haffke (Oskar Bökelmann), Sebastian Schumann (Louis Hofmann) and Helmut Morbach (Joel Basman).

They all look alike in their ill-fitting uniforms and, when one of the brothers speaks out of turn, Rasmussen takes sadistic pleasure in slapping his face and barking intimidatingly as the frightened boy snivels. Accompanied by his faithful dog, Otto, he takes them through the dunes to the windswept beach and informs them that there are 45,000 mines in the area between the flags and that it will take them three months to clear them if they each defuse six mines an hour. Fortunately, they have location charts at their disposal and Rasmussen urges them to keep these up to date, as their safety depends upon precision. Crawling on their bellies, they use sticks to prod the sand and the first session goes without a hitch.

Allowed to stuff sacks with grass to make palliasses, the minesweepers chat in their rough-and-ready dormitory, with Schumann asking the others what they plan to do when they get home and snapping. When he mentions working as a mechanic, Lebern offers an apprenticeship in his father's factory. But the cynical Morbach mocks them for believing in illusions. Meanwhile, the twins spot Elisabeth eating bread and Ernst plays with her doll to distract her while he steals the crust.

Barricaded in for the night, the Germans complain about going two days without food and send Schumann to petition Rasmussen. He is indifferent to their plight and refuses to allow Ernst time off when he falls ill. However, when Lebern has his forearms blown off after vomiting on a mine, Rasmussen is compelled to take action and discovers that Morbach has stolen some feed laced with rat droppings from Karin's barn. She is delighted to have wreaked some revenge, but Rasmussen forces his charges to drink salt water to purge themselves before hosing them down. He also sees the sense in Schumann''s claim that they would work better if they weren't starving and steals some supplies after driving to the main camp to ask after Lebern.

Withholding the news of his death, Rasmussen delivers the meagre rations and commends Schumann on his initiative in inventing a wooden frame to protect him on the sand. Grateful for the bread and potatoes, the youths work well. On the way back to their barracks, Haffke tells the twins about longing for a beer and a girl when he gets home and they reveal their plan to become bricklayers, as so much of the country will need rebuilding that they will get rich quickly. That night, however, Jensen brings some friends to taunt the captives and Haffke is doused with petrol, while one of the others is threatened at gunpoint. Rasmussen asks Jensen to leave the kids alone, as he needs them all to complete his mission. He also puts in a request for some more experienced soldiers. But Jensen sneers at him for becoming so attached to his unit that he is willing to steal food for them.

Rasmussen's situation deteriorates when Werner is killed by a large mine and he has to give Ernst a sedative to calm him down. He stays by his bedside, strokes his forehead and promises that he doesn't hate Werner, as Ernst tries to go in search of his sibling. Leaving him to sleep, Rasmussen sits with Schumann, who makes him laugh by pretending that the cross around his neck is explosive. Feeling pity for a kid who has no idea if his family has survived the final onslaught, Rasmussen steals some more food and arranges a football match on the beach. During the game, newcomers Gustav Becker (Aaron Koszuta) and Albert Bewer (Levin Henning) arrive and they join in the fun. As they return, however, Rasmussen throws a ball for Otto to chase and he steps on a mine.

Back at the barracks, Ernst finds a pet mouse and is stroking it when he hears the explosion. The Germans are as distraught as Otto's master, but he takes his distress out on Haffke and makes him fetch the tennis ball in his mouth for not clearing his section properly. Schumann and Morbach try to intercede for him, but Rasmussen shouts them down and curses himself for being too soft on them. Furthermore, he requests two armed guards from base and forces the group to link arms and walk through the supposedly cleared area to ensure there have been no more mistakes. Morbach asks why he doesn't just shoot them and begins laughing hysterically. Rasmussen slaps him repeatedly across the face and orders him to act like a man before sending them off, with even Karin thinking that he is being unnecessarily cruel. Morbach is bent on desertion, but Schumann has him tied to the bed to prevent any reprisals. The next morning, all bar Ernst follow Karin when she finds Elisabeth playing in the middle of an uncleared zone and Rasmussen returns from base to find Schumann crawling over the sand to rescue her. Keen to keep the child from panicking, Ernst strides across to sit with her and they play with her doll while Schumann inches closer. But, having done his bit, Ernst refuses to follow them back to safety and blows himself up on the nearest mine.

Rasmussen urges Schumann to remain strong and promises that he will make it home. But, while four of the group are working on the beach, the others loading defused mines on to a truck are blown to smithereens by a rogue device and Rasmussen arranges for Schumann, Haffke, Morbach and Selke to be driven away. As he collects the black flags, he consoles himself with the fact the survivors are going home. But Jensen has already transferred them to Skallingen, where 72,000 unmapped mines await them and he derides Rasmussen for forgetting that they are Nazi scum. However, Rasmussen is a man of his word and he intercepts the quartet and drives them towards the German border and tells them to make a run for home.

It might come as a surprise to learn that this was one of the five features nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, as just about every aspect of the storyline is entirely predictable. Rasmussen's transformation from martinet to mentor is as signposted as the death of the dog and the endangerment of the child. It also doesn't take much to guess which of the Germans will survive to the end. Yet Zandvliet and co-editors Per Sandholt and Molly Malene Stensgaard manage to maintain the suspense on the sands and each accident catches the audience unawares. With a little help from Sune Martin’s cimbalom-inflected score, he even persuades us to feel pity for his cardboard cut-out characters, as we learn absolutely nothing about the Germans and Zandvliet does little to distinguish between them.

The death of twins who are scarcely older than Elisabeth is made more harrowing by their innocent game with a beetle they have named Tim Benny and Ernst's bid to replace his lost brother with a field mouse. But we have no idea what horrors they might have witnessed after being conscripted as cannon fodder in the final months of the war. Similarly, nothing is said about Rasmussen's experiences during the five-year occupation. Clearly, he has not been a red beret during this period, but Zandvliet lets nothing slip about his military record or whether he has been bereaved. Consequently, his bitter hatred of the retreating Nazis lacks the righteousness or depth that would give emotional heft to the tussle between his patriotism and his growing paternalistic realisation that the kids in his care are also victims of injustice.

Bristling behind a sandy moustache, Roland Møller holds things together with some aplomb. But compatriots Mikkel Boe Følsgaard and Laura Bro struggle to make much out of their caricatured supporting roles, although Louis Hofmann, Joel Basman and Emil Belton fare better as the most prominent prisoners. Making his third feature after Applause (2009) and A Funny Man (2011), Zandvliet doesn't always avoid the maudlin or the melodramatic. But he joins admirably with cinematographer-wife Camilla Hjelm Knudsen and sound designer Rasmus Winther Jensen to convey the wild beauty of a desecrated coastline that was only declared mine-free in 2012. Moreover, he raises some intriguing issues about the relatively little-explored thirst for vengeance that existed among the liberated in postwar Europe and the extent to which the Allies turned a blind eye to illegal practices like the Danish mine clearance.

Having forged a reputation with her prize-winning shorts, Strap on Olympia (1995), Pentuphouse (1998), Flower Girl (2000) and Joy (2000), Australian director Cate Shortland made a positive impression with her first features, Somersault (2004) and Lore (2012), which respectively focused on the sexual and political awakening of young girls in rural New South Wales and Nazi Germany. She further explores the dilemmas facing independent women in Berlin Syndrome, which has been adapted from an acclaimed Melanie Joosten novel by sophomore screenwriter Shaun Grant, who made such an impressive debut with his Justin Kurzel's The Snowtown Murders (2011). Despite its Stockholm Syndrome theme and several incidents of excruciating suspense, this is closer in tone to such measured studies of abduction as Michel Franco's Daniel & Ana (2009), Markus Schleinzer's Michael (2011), Jennifer Lynch's Chained (2012) and Lenny Abrahamson's Room (2015) than more generic detention and torture offerings.

Arriving in Berlin from Brisbane to have a life experience, twentysomething photographer Tessa Palmer hooks up with some English-speaking Germans in a backstreet bar. She winds up smoking dope on the roof of the townhouse where she is staying and takes pictures of the sun coming up over the city. Keen to do a book on East German architecture, Palmer buys some old slides from an antique shop and leafs through a book on Gustav Klimt before bumping into English teacher Max Riemelt at a pedestrian crossing. He offers her a strawberry and takes her for a walk to the allotments where his father, Matthias Habich, has a plot. He asks if anyone knows where she is when she lets a call from her mother go to voicemail. But he turns down an invitation for a nightcap, as he has a prior engagement.

Charmed by his good looks and mistranslations, Palmer quickly develops a crush on Riemelt and lies in bed studying his picture on her camera. She had planned to move on to Dresden, but decides to return to the neighbourhood where she had run into Riemelt and is delighted to find him in the bookshop skimming through the same volume on Klimt. Their fingers touch on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, as Palmer comments (with grim irony) that the subject hid her deformed hand during the sitting. They go for a drink and he looks through the photos on her camera and dismisses her notion that East Germans were plucky people. He also surprises her when he grabs her throat, as he searches for the right word to describe how choked they were by the Communist regime.

As she has moved out of her temporary accommodation, Palmer accepts the offer of a bed for the night. She lets her fingers run over the peeling paint in the corridor of his building in a rundown part of town and soon finds his hands all over her body. Allowing him to peel off her t-shirt, she falls back on the bed and gasps when he removes her underwear. As they chat in post-coital whispers, Riemelt wishes she didn't have to leave. But, even though she is flattered by his compliments, she regrets not being able to get to know him better, as she has so much to see in such a short space of time.

The next day, Riemelt teaches his class James Baldwin's 1956 novel, Giovanni's Room, while Palmer discovers she has been locked in. She mooches around the apartment all day and teases Riemelt when he gets home about trying to take her prisoner. He insists he forgot to leave her a key and they make love in the shower before going clubbing. However, when Riemelt wakes the following morning, she discovers that the latch key doesn't fit the lock and that Riemelt has removed the SIM card from her phone. She also realises that he has removed the wedding ring necklace that her mother gave her and she becomes even more concerned when she finds some Polaroids hidden in a book in the kitchen. Yet, when she tries to smash the window with a chair, she finds that Riemelt has fitted reinforced glass and that she is trapped.

Failing to push past him when he returns home, Palmer tries to reason with Riemelt and apologises for saying anything during sex that might have given him the wrong impression. But he merely asks her if she likes fresh pesto and reminds her that no one can hear her no matter what noise she makes. He leaves her bound to the bed the following day, as he drops into the college where his father is lecturing. Riemelt resents Habich informing his students that his son has no idea about the realities of life in the former GDR and they continue bickering over supper, when Riemelt mentions that he has a new Australian girlfriend and Habich asks him what happened to the Canadian he had been seeing.

Back home, Riemelt unties Palmer and gives her space to shower. But she finds a long strand of blonde hair and realises she is not the first to enjoy Riemelt's hospitality. He tells her that he texted her mother to say she was okay and proceeds to take more Polaroids of her with her wrists and ankles tied. However, Palmer persuades him to let her loose the next morning, as she can't escape and wants to do more than watch cartoons on television. But, as soon as Riemelt leaves, Palmer begins searching through cupboards for something to use as a weapon and is surprised to find a screwdriver under the sofa. She bides her time when Riemelt returns (feeling tense after a staffroom showdown with Lucie Aron for using his mug) comes home and gets him interested in the jigsaw he bought her. But, then, she slams the tool through his hand and grabs the keys while he struggles to free himself. Palmer hurtles down the stairs and across the courtyard, only to find that the gate is locked and she is knocked unconscious with a broken hand and carried back to the flat when the bleeding Riemelt catches up with her.

Binding his wound, Riemelt carries on as normal. Habich is suspicious when he claims a chisel slipped while he was doing some DIY and rips off the plaster because the wound is getting infected. He asks if Riemelt would like to see his mother, but he insists he wants nothing to do with her because she defected to the West and abandoned them. Palmer notices his tetchy mood and puts on an old LP to amuse herself, while Riemelt takes another photograph and locks himself in his room.

At school, Riemelt has trouble keeping his eyes of gymnast Emma Bading, while coaching the basketball team. But he is horrified when she comes to the apartment and knocks on the door when he is cutting Palmer's hair in the shower. She peeps past him and sees the stranger in her towel, but still asks Riemelt why he was ogling her in the gym. He accuses her of having been flaunting herself and threatens to report her if she does it again. Intrigued, Palmer asks about Bading, but knows not to push her luck too far as she has been trying to pick the front door with a paperclip, which had snapped in his bedroom lock.

Christmas comes and Riemelt goes to stay with Habich and his pet dog. Lotte. On the first night he is away, the power shorts and Palmer is left in darkness. But she can still cook with gas and looks out on the snow covering the courtyard. She is left longer than she expected, however, because Habich dies during the night and Riemelt is reluctant to let him go. As he trims his toenails, Palmer paints hers and, as Riemelt wanders into the cellar and takes out his frustrations on a punching bag, Palmer snoops around the apartment and finds a novelty floaty pen from Calgary. Finally, however, Riemelt calls for an ambulance and he returns home feeling so low that he clings to Palmer, who had convinced herself he was never coming back. They grind together in desperation on the living-room floor and Palmer runs her fingers through her sobbing captor's hair, as she holds him.

Palmer wears one of her new dresses for Christmas day and is grateful for the novels he buys her. She asks if he ever thinks about the Canadian girl, but Riemelt denies that there has ever been anyone else in his life. He tells Palmer to close her eyes and presents her with Habich's dog and she cradles the creature after it licks her face. The following day, he takes Palmer for a walk in the woods and she enjoys the sensation of the snow on her fingertips, while he lingers with an axe. But a small boy walking nearby with his mother and brother hurts his leg and Riemelt is furious when Palmer tries to urge the sibling to call the cops. As he can't speak English, however, the boy becomes frightened and pulls away from her.

Returning to the car, Riemelt asks Palmer how she would mark their relationship out of 10 and, when she gives them a seven, he punishes her by forcing her into the boot for the drive home. He also lets Lotte run away when he takes her for a walk and Palmer has become so inured to his cruelty that she merely shrugs. Riemelt leaves her alone on New Year's Eve to go to friend Christoph Franken's party, but he is asked to leave when he accuses hostess Elmira Bahrami of being a shameless flirt.

In his absence, Palmer breaks into his room and finds two photo albums, one of which is filled with the Polaroids that Riemelt has taken of her, while the other seems to contain pictures of her dead predecessor. Pausing to watch the fireworks at midnight, Riemelt tries to chat up a lone tourist, only for her friend to call her away. While he drives home, Palmer spots a light in another window across the courtyard and frantically tries to signal through the window. However, just as the squatter reaches the apartment door, Riemelt caves in his skull with a tyre iron and he blames Palmer for the stranger's death, as he wraps his body in plastic sheeting and burns it in a dumpster.

A short while later, Riemelt sees a newspaper article about Palmer being missing. He orders her to pack her belongings because he needs to fumigate the apartment. But she spots that he is marking Bading's homework and burns her hand on the gas stove to create a distraction in order to slip an incriminating Polaroid between the pages of the exercise book. Leaving for school, the next day, Riemelt switches off the water supply to the flat. He returns the homework without noticing that Bading has found the snapshot and gives her permission to go to the bathroom without a second thought. She drops the picture, which is handed round the class before Riemelt confiscates it and dashes to his car to try and stop Bading from helping Palmer escape.

Held up in traffic, he abandons his car and sprints through the streets. He finds Bading's bicycle leaning up against the wall and grabs the crowbar to confront them. The door is open, but there is no sign of either Palmer or Bading until Riemelt hears the latter calling to him from the next landing. He smashes in the door of the upstairs flat that seems to have been empty for a long time. Palmer calls to him again and he creeps inside the apartment, only for Palmer to lock him inside and free Bading from her hiding place inside a wall panel. Realising he has been outfoxed, Riemelt sits in his reclining chair, while Palmer gazes out of a taxi window at the Brandenburg Gate and the Fernsehturm as she crosses into the old West Berlin and savours her liberty.

Played with admirable restraint by Palmer and Riemelt, this unsettling story depends heavily on the exceptional craft contributions of cinematographer Germain McMickling, production designer Melinda Doring and editor Jack Hutchings. A little more background on Palmer might not have gone amiss, but Shortland and Grant leak details of Riemelt's past through his visits to Habich and the second photo album. Yet they never provide entirely convincing reasons for his warped behaviour and why he seems not to notice (or care) that Palmer has breached his inner sanctum. It also seems odd that Aron, Bading and Bahrami should all find him peculiar without mentioning their misgivings to anyone else. Most damningly, Shortland struggles to convey the impression that Palmer harbours any Stockholm Syndrome feelings for Riemelt after Habich's demise, as she seems to remain pretty intent on escaping even after sleeping with him a second time after his prolonged absence. Such quibbles aside, however, this makes for disconcerting viewing, as Shortland exploits the proximity of the pair and their contrasts in body language, while McMickling's camera creeps around in the shadows to Bryony Marks's onerous electronic score. At times, Palmer and Riemelt recall Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins as they chat over sandwiches in the Bates Motel office in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). But the wildly melodramatic denouement is not handled with the same degree of finesse, as Grant and Shortland seem to lose their nerve after teasing out the increasingly far-fetched events for almost two hours and they rather lurch towards the gauchely symbolic flight to freedom with as much a sense of relief that their ordeal is over as Palmer.

Ingmar Bergman is the sole Swede to have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Indeed, beside his victories for The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Fanny and Alexander (1982), he also drew nine further nominations, including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay for Cries and Whispers (1973). In all, 15 Swedish features have been nominated for the foreign-language prize and the latest, Hannes Holm's A Man Called Ove, is now available on disc and download. It might be closer in tone to the films of Roy Andersson than Bergman. But this steady adaptation of Fredrik Backman's bestseller provides a timely reminder about the importance of community and the duty of care that local government has towards its constituents.

Fresh from an argument in a garden centre about a two-for-one offer, 59 year-old Ove Lindahl (Rolf Lassgård) puts flowers on the grave of his late wife, Sonja (Ida Engvoll). Returning to his cul-de-sac, he performs his periodic tour of the neighbourhood to remove illegally parked bikes, retrieve toys from the sandpit and sort the recycling. He notes Anita (Chatarina Larsson) feeding her paralysed husband Rune (Börje Lundberg) and marches on to lecture residents' association chair Anders (Fredrik Evers) and his spouse, Mähät (Jessica Olsson) about keeping their dog on a lead. But Ove is more than just a busybody. He has never forgiven Rune for ousting him as head of the association several years before and insists on doing his rounds to prove that no one could do the job more diligently.

Ove feels much the same way about his job at the railway engineering shed, where he has toiled for 43 years. But his thrusting young bosses have other ideas and, when they suggest he retrains to learn some digital skills, he resigns on the spot and stalks off with a garden spade as a parting gift. Having paid another visit to Sonja's grave, Ove comes home to hang himself. But, just as he puts the noose around his neck, he is disturbed by Parvaneh Lufsen (Bahar Pars) backing a car past his window. As driving is forbidden in this part of the street, he rushes outside in time to see her husband, Patrick (Tobias Almborg) reverse into his pillar box. Pushing Patrick out of the way as the heavily pregnant Parvanesh swears in Persian, Ove says hello to their young daughters in the backseat - Sepideh (Nelly Jamarani) and Nasanin (Zozan Akgün) - before strutting back indoors.

Following a disturbed night's sleep, as the new neighbours opposite party loudly with their friends, Ove does his customary tour. He tries to shoo away an unkempt stray cat and is affronted when a stranger (Johan Widerberg) in a vehicle from the Konsensus care home flicks a cigarette out of his window, as he snubs Ove's complaint about him driving in a pedestrian area. When Anita informs him that the man works for the council and has come to see about putting Rune in a home, Ove turns on his heel and ignores her request to take a look at their faulty heating. He returns to the cemetery and fights to keep his frustration under control, as he tells Sonja that the world has gone mad since everyone started having time for lunch. But he promises to join her later in the day and heads home to don his suit and fetch the noose out of the jacket pocket.

However, he is interrupted again when Sepideh and Nasanin ring the doorbell to offer him a tupperware of their mother's cooking. He accepts testily and equally begrudgingly lends Patrick a ladder, while correcting Parvaneh's Swedish. She introduces herself to Anita when she pops round to ask Ove to help with the radiators and they chat about the `coup' that saw Rune take over the running of the association by a landslide. Fuming at this lack of consideration, Ove storms inside and only calms down when he catches sight of Sonja's smiling face in his favourite photograph. He breathes in her scent from the clothing hanging in the wardrobe and relives a happy moment from when they first moved in and she asked his younger self (Filip Berg) to make some more bookshelves.

More determined that ever to join his beloved, Ove climbs on to the stool and feels it disappear beneath his feet. As he hangs from the ceiling, his mind goes back to his mother's funeral and how his seven year-old self (Viktor Baagøe) had followed his father (Stefan Gödicke) in showing no emotion. They did bond over car engines, however, and Ove enjoyed helping him clean the rolling stock in the shunting yard. He could never understand why people claimed his father was too kind and never forgot the day he rescued him from the burly Tom (Ola Hedén), who was threatening to beat him for refusing to hand over a lost purse. But, on the day he got his final exam results, Ove saw his father crushed by a locomotive when he ran to show his workmates his son's grades.

As the shock of this recollection hits home, Ove is pitched on to the floor by the snapping rope and he bemuses the clerk at the DIY store by complaining about their shoddy goods. He keeps chuntering while changing the flowers on Sonja's grave before putting down some newspaper so that he can lie beside her. On returning home, he reprimands Mähät for throwing stones at the cat (who is called Cat Nuisance in the book) because it hissed at her Chihuahua. He goes to feed it the saffron chicken that Parvaneh had made, but it has gone by the time he comes out.

Hitting upon a foolproof plan, Ove demands that Anita returns the hose she had borrowed several months before. He agrees to bleed the radiators while she fetches it and he confides in Rune that the neighbourhood has so gone to pot that he plans to kill himself. As local slacker Jimmy (Klas Wiljergård) arrives for lunch, however, Ove is appalled to learn that, despite being unable to communicate, Rune can understand everything that is said to him and is spooked when he grabs on to the hose as he tries to leave.

As he sits in his car, with the engine running in the garage and the fumes passing through the hosepipe, he thinks back to the way he had tried to rebuild his life after his father's death. He had been given his job after he had tried to pay back his unearned salary and had dealt with Tom when he attempted to steal his father's watch. But two representatives from the council (whom he brands `whiteshirts') had informed him that the family home in a sleepy country nook had been earmarked for demolition and one (Erik Ståhlberg) had ordered the firemen not to extinguish the flames after it had caught fire while he was rescuing two of his neighbours from a blaze they seem to have caused in a bid to claim the insurance.

From that moment, Ove had detested authority. But his fortunes had taken a turn from the better after he had started sleeping in idle carriages. Waking one morning to find himself an hour from home and Sonja smiling at him, he had let her pay for his ticket and listened as she chatted about the fare-dodging cat in Mikhail Bulgarkov's The Master and Margharita. She had corrected his pronunciation and announced that she was training to be a teacher. But, even in his panic to get back to work, Ove had noticed her red shoes and her smile and he had spent the next three weeks on the same train hoping to bump into her again. When he finally succeeded, he had fibbed about doing his military service and she had coaxed him into inviting her for dinner. Conversation had hardly flowed during their date, but she was so smitten with the handsome, tongue-tied palooka that she had kissed him in order to stop him from leaving in embarrassment.

At Sonja's urging, Ove had qualified as an engineer and had asked her to marry him. But the memory of the smoke emanating from the dumper truck that had parked beside his open window as he had popped the question rouses him back to consciousness in the present, along with Parvaneh knocking vigorously on the garage door. She needs a lift to the hospital because Patrick has fallen off a ladder. Sitting on newspaper in the backseat, Sepideh and Nasanin complain about the smell and annoy Ove by winding down the windows. He is even more nonplussed when Parvaneh asks him to keep an eye on the girls while she visits Patrick.

Unused to dealing with children, he starts to read them a story and they are amused when he puts on a funny voice for a train-driving bear. Unfortunately, they are distracted by Beppo the Clown (Anna Granath) and winds up being questioned by hospital security when he makes her fall into a potted tree after treading on her long shoe in trying to recover a coin she had borrowed for a magic trick. Parvaneh wants to be cross with him for neglecting the girls, but they give him such a warm hug when they get home that she lets it slide.

The next day, Ove leaves early with the intention of throwing himself under a train coming into the station. However, a passenger collapses on the platform and rolls on to the track and, seeing the other bystanders doing nothing but filming the incident on their phones, Ove jumps down to rescue him. For a second, he considers letting the train plough into him. But he catches sight of his younger self in the crowd and thinks better of it. However, he soon has cause to regret his change of heart, as Parvaneh and Jimmy insist on him taking care of the cat when they find it shivering on the doorstep. In searching for a blanket, Pavaneh notices the low table in the kitchen and Jimmy tactfully informs her that Sonja needed it that way before she died. Returning to the cemetery, Ove (who had struggled for breath after running upstairs to find a blanket) grumbles about the difficulty of topping onself before introducing Sonja to the cat. As he gets ready for bed that night, he sees Parvaneh with her daughters and his mind drifts back to the night that Sonja had told him she was pregnant. She had reassured him that he would be a good father and they had fallen asleep with him holding her index finger. But he doesn't have time for reveries, as Anders has offered to give Parvaneh driving lessons and Ove is damned if he is going to let that boob gazump him again. She hugs him in delight and brings some homemade biscuits to her first lesson. Yet, even though he puts paper down on her seat, Ove gets out to remonstrate with a motorist who honks her when she stalls at some traffic lights. He also reminds her that she has escaped from Iran, learned a new language, married an idiot and given birth twice, so driving should be a doddle.

They stop for Napoleon cake and coffee at Sonja's favourite café. He tells her how he and Rune (Simeon Da Costa Maya) had whipped the neighbourhood into shape after he had moved in with Anita (Maja Rung). But they had fallen out when the Saab-loving Ove discovered that Rune drove a Volvo and they had virtually stopped speaking by the time of the coup. However, Ove had felt sorry for Rune when his son moved to America and he had tried to bury the hatchet. But Rune ruined everything by showing off his new BMW.

Parvaneh asks Ove if he ever had children of his own. But, before he can answer, she dupes him into babysitting Sepideh and Nasanin while she is at a highway code class with Patrick. On her return, she is astonished to find that Ove has tidied up the kitchen and is cradling the sleeping Nasanin while he watches Sepideh play a house-building game on her laptop. She wonders if she has discovered the old man's soft centre and he certainly seems to have mellowed, as he strokes the cat as it snoozes beside him on the bed.

The next morning, Ove gets chatting to Adrian (Simon Edenroth) about the bicycle he has confiscated. He learns that Sonja used to be his teacher and, because he spoke so nicely about her, Ove fixes the puncture and drops off the bike during Parvaneh's driving lesson. Adrian works at a kebab shop with Mirsad (Poyan Karimi), a gay Bosnian who is touched by the fact that Ove has more against Adrian buying a French car than he does against him wearing eye-liner. Parvaneh is also becoming increasingly fond of Ove and is pleased to make him laugh after he tries to lock a journalist (Anna-Lena Bergelin) in his garage because she wants to do a story about his station heroics. But she oversteps the mark in offering to help box up Sonja's belongings so that he can move on with his life and Ove gets even more wound up when the whiteshirt seeking to commit Rune refuses to be intimidated by his bluster because he has looked him up online and knows he is nothing but a blowhard.

He also tells Ove to look after his heart and he feels pains in his chest after he slams the front door. Ignoring Parvaneh knocking to check he is okay, he sits on the sofa and sobs, as he remembers how Sonja had broken the news about their baby while they danced in the front room. Unsure what to say, he had rushed into the garage to make a crib and, on going up to the attic to find it, he comes across an old rifle. Stripping to his underwear and putting up plastic sheeting to stop the blood going everywhere, he puts the barrel against his forehead.

However, his arm is jolted by the sound of the doorbell and the shot misses. On opening the door, he finds Adrian and Mirsad standing in the darkness. They ask he can put the latter up for a couple of days because his parents have thrown him out for being gay. When Adrian claims Sonja would not have turned him away, Ove agrees and is pleasantly surprised when Mirsad not only makes breakfast, but also asks to join him on his rounds. Jimmy also accompanies them and they mention that Rune is being taken to the home the next day. Ove insists that Anita will fight, but Jimmy says she has given up struggling after three years and Ove is appalled that she never mentioned the problem to Sonja because she felt they had enough to contend with.

Aghast to have been such a fool for so long, Ove sits at Sonja's graveside and apologises for having been such a grump and vows to put things right. Gathering all Anita''s documents on the case, he borrows Parvaneh's phone to lodge an appeal against the verdict. But he loses his temper and she asks him to leave because she is tired of him being so quixotic and convinced that the whole world is against him. He calms down and tells her about the idyllic Spanish holiday he had enjoyed with Sonja just before the baby was born. They had travelled by bus and sampled the local cuisine at every opportunity. But, on the journey home, a drunken driver had crashed off a winding mountain road and Ove had only escaped serious injury because he was in the toilet. Sonja lost the baby and the use of her legs and Ove had spent the next year trying to sue the wine merchant, the bus company and the schools that refused to employ Sonja because they didn't have a ramp for her wheelchair. One night, however, he had gone out and built one himself and they had started to live again.

Parvaneh takes Oves hand, as he recalls how she had dedicated her time to special needs kids and taught them to value themselves. However, she had died of cancer six months ago and he had promised to follow her. But, now maybe, he realises he still has things to do. Consequently, he stands beside Anita as Lena the journalist he had tried to lock in the garage confronts the Konsensus whiteshirt with evidence that Ove has unearthed about financial irregularities and he delights in the slight smile that Rune gives him as he describes how easily the weasel had backed down.

As he walks home, however, Ove collapses and is rushed to hospital. Parvaneh is touched that he has listed her as next of kin and she laughs at how rubbish he is at dying when the doctor informs her that he will survive in spite of the fact that his heart is too big. Ironically, he mirth sends her into labour and a recovered Ove offers her the crib that was never used. Parvaneh accepts and leaves him holding the baby, who smiles up at him. He feels even more part of the family when Sepideh and Nasanin start calling him grandpa. But, just as he begins to relish this new phase of his life, Ove dies in his sleep with the cat on his chest. Parvaneh realises something is wrong when she sees the snow undisturbed on his path at 8am and finds a note beside the bed. He reassures her that he has not done anything silly, but asks for a church funeral and she is happy to see it so well attended.

Sepideh makes sure the gate is properly locked, as the mourners make their way home. But they have nothing to worry about, for, as the elderly Ove wakes from his slumber, he sees Sonja sitting opposite him and the years fall away from their faces as she reaches out her hand and he takes her by the index finger with a smile in the knowledge that they can never be separated again.

Initially known for his partnership with Måns Herngren on such breezy comedies as Adam & Eva (1997), Sh*t Happens (2000) and The Class Reunion (2002), Hannes Holm has been flying solo for the last decade with the likes of Wonderful and Loved By All (2007) and Behind Blue Skies (2010), as well as working on three entries in the Anderssons kidpic series. None of his previous pictures had secured a release in this country, but A Man Called Ove seemed destined to travel having landed an Oscar nomination after becoming the biggest home hit at the Swedish box office in 32 years.

Although it has been lazily compared in some places to Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), this has much more in common with Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, Wild Strawberries, which also followed a grumpy egotist on a journey of self-realisation that was punctuated by reveries and dreams. Borrowing from Alf Sjöberg's 1951 adaptation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, Bergman had dispensed with cuts and dissolves to blur the line between past and present, musing and memory, and Holm does much the same in this twilight rite of passage by having Rolf Lassgård wander in and out of recollections that seem to be taking place right in front of his eyes.

It's a risky gambit, but it pays off handsomely thanks to Göran Hallberg's agile camerawork and Jan Olof Ågren's exceptional production design, as well as Lassgård's subtle shifts between being querulous, mournful, bombastic and foolish. Essentially playing variations on the roles that Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Thulin took opposite Victor Sjöström's irascible medic, Ida Engvoll and Bahar Pars enhance the feel-good factor.

But, as with Gaute Storaas's orchestral score, Holm's direction can't resist the temptation to overdo the bathos and overstate the message in the closing stages, with the result that some of the Kaurismäkian satirical edge is frustratingly blunted. A case in point is the dead-end digression involving Mirsad, who seems to appear from nowhere solely (there's no sign of him co-habiting when Parvaneh notices the virgin snow) to remind the audience that while Ove is a misanthrope, he is not a bigot. The showdown with the whiteshirt seeking to exploit Rune and Anita also feels overly contrived. Yet, such quibbles aside, this is a hugely enjoyable film and worth watching alone for the excellently cantankerous Lassgård's interaction with the sleepy Orlando and the pugnacious Magic in the role of the blue-eyed Persian cat who adopts him.