In the Fade movie review & film summary (2017)

As the film opens, Katja (Kruger) is dropping off her son, Rocco (Rafael Santana), with her Turkish immigrant husband, Nuri (Numan Acar) at the tax consulting firm that they run before going off for a spa date with a pregnant friend. We learn that they two met when she was in college and he was her weed dealer. Eventually, he went to prison for four years on drug charges (the film opens with the cell phone video of their prison wedding) and spent the time studying business in the hopes of making a new life for himself and Katja. Upon release, they opened their firm, catering to the local immigrant population, had Rocco and settled into a happy domestic routine. That routine is shattered forever when Katja returns to the office later on and finds that there has been an explosion and her husband and child are now dead.

While talking to the police, Katja recalls an odd fact—as she was leaving, a young woman left a bicycle untethered outside the building, and when she tried to warn her, the woman walked away insisting she was coming right back. Katja investigates and comes to believe that the bombing was orchestrated by neo-Nazis targeting immigrants. Because of Nuri’s checkered past, the police insist on pursuing the theory that he had gone back into dealing and that the murder was drug-related. Due to the pressures of this wrongheaded inquiry, further exacerbated by family tensions and the unimaginable horror of planning a funeral for a husband and child whose bodies were reduced to pieces, Katja succumbs, first to drugs and then to despair. But just when all seems lost, the bombers are caught and they indeed turn out to be a young neo-Nazi couple (Ulrich Brandhoff and Hanna Hilsdorf). It appears to be an open-and-shut case—the prosecution has the evidence, Katja’s eyewitness account and even the testimony of the father of one of the defendants going for it. It isn’t and the completely broken Katja is determined to get some measure of justice by any possible means.

Whatever one might say in tough-talking Facebook posts, most ordinary people, given the opportunity, might indeed blanch at the notion of taking someone else’s life as an act of revenge, no matter how justified such actions might be. The trick for a movie of this type, at least one that is aspiring to be more than just a simple-minded exploitation film (such as the original Charles Bronson “Death Wish,” a far more complicated work than usually given credit for, especially in comparison to its tacky sequels), is to create a narrative that somehow justifies such actions without completely overdoing it. For a little while during the first section, it seems as if Akin has done just that in the way that he quickly and neatly establishes both the loving bond between Katja and her loved ones during the few moments that we see them together, and the sense of rage, frustration and helplessness that accompanies the wrongheaded police investigation. However, during the middle courtroom section, things grow increasingly unsubtle—the defense attorney (Johannes Krisch) not only employs an outrageous strategy to create doubt about the guilt of his clients (oddly, there seems to be virtually no media interest in the crime or the trial) but looks like the less attractive cousin of Nosferatu to boot—and go completely off the rails during the highly implausible final section.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46ipWasmJp6p63DnmRraGFs