Brendan Gleeson offers a stoic performance as Otto Quangel, a German factory worker whose son’s death drives him to drop handwritten postcards with anti-Nazi messages across Berlin, in Vincent Perez’s second world war drama. It’s a small, subversive act, but his hope is that notes reading “Stop the war machine” and “The Führer is a liar” will serve as “sand in the machine”. Soon, police inspector Escherich (Daniel Brühl) investigates the postcards in what he calls Operation Hobgoblin. Visually, it’s tedious, comprising staid, greyish greens. What’s weirder is that the film is in English (though the accents are German), a distancing device that distracts.
