The Reader

Behind the mystery lies a truth that will make you question everything you know.

A morally complex, melancholic examination of complicity, shame, and the impossibility of redemption, built on an intimate but ultimately tragic relationship between a young man and a woman haunted by her wartime crimes.

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.