Homegrown terror

German drama ‘In the Fade’ examines the tragedy of xenophobic violence

Terrorism, nationalism, xenophobia. The film may be foreign, but the issues aren’t.

Anxieties at the forefront of our own political unrest are also relevant around the globe, including in Germany. As much as any country in the West, it has experienced a major influx of immigration. With that come possible imported dangers that fuel domestic fears.

Those fears often result in citizens jumping to irrational conclusions. And, sometimes, with deadly results. “In the Fade” is a riveting German drama about the consequences of this paranoia.

Told in three chapters, “In the Fade” ratchets tension exponentially with each progressive act. The first follows familiar beats of homegrown terrorism and the devastating wake of loss, but the second act stages a riveting courtroom drama that is capped by a tense yet sobering third-act quasi-thriller.

Katja is the surviving widow of her husband Nuri, a Turkish immigrant. He and their son Rocco die when a backpack pipebomb explodes outside his small tax and accounting business.

Given the bomb’s specific, contained impact, Nuri was clearly the target, but the immediate mystery is who would want to kill him, especially in a fashion that instantly evokes radicalized terror.

Police start by looking into Nuri’s drug-dealing criminal past and his short stint in prison. Was he mixed up in radical Islam? Organized crime? Something else? All options are on the table as Katja (Diane Kruger, who won Best Actress at last summer’s Cannes Film Festival) must start to wrestle with the possibility that her husband may not have been as rehabilitated as she thought, but her conviction never waivers.

In what first appears be nothing more than a slog about a grief observed and its depressive downward spiral, “In the Fade” takes swift dramatic turns. As the trial unfolds, the accused’s skilled lawyer plants doubts in a cut-and-dried case of damning evidence, turning a cruel microscope onto Katja herself, a key eye witness.

Writer/director Fatih Akin, a Turkish-German himself, translates his own unease into Katja, a native character more relatable to the white German majority. With expansive empathy, Akin understands that the victims of violence aren’t only the survivors; they’re also the families of those who have embraced ideological brutality. The former are burdened with sorrow, the latter with shame.

As the verdict sparks a retaliatory vengeance and Katja finds herself confronting the unimaginable, “In the Fade” becomes the antithesis of its title, crescendoing to a disturbing, tragic gut-punch.