West review: Fascinating procedural anchored by clever and frequently carnal performances

Three years after the Russian father of her son dies during an academic trip to Moscow, Nelly Senff (Jordis Triebel) decides to leave East Germany for good. She’s greeted at the border by agents who strip- search her. Arriving in West Germany, she and her son Alexej (Tristan Göbel) are given a shared apartment and food stamps. The complex is better equipped to receive refugees than some other European countries can manage three decades later.

But that does not stop Nelly from feeling resentful about the stamps she must collect to claim citizenship. One stamp requires a full body-lice inspection, a procedure that is not dissimilar to her humiliating experiences crossing the border. Another involves answering questions about her late partner. What was a Russian physicist doing in East Germany, anyway?

Nelly never actually saw the body – the funeral took place in Moscow. She attracts the attention of an American agent (Inglourious Basterds' Jacky Ido, marvellous) working with the Allied Security Services. But the information she seduces out of him only serves to send her into a state of unhinged paranoia.

Everybody here could be a Stasi, even Hans (Alexander Scheer), a pitiful man who has become a father figure for Alexej.

Christian Schwochow's film starts out as a fascinating procedural anchored by Triebel's clever and frequently carnal performance. Working from Julia Franck's novel Lagerfeuer, Heide Schwochow's (the director's mother) screenplay effectively distils the complexity of German border crossing during the 1970s into family drama.

Still, Nelly’s psychological disintegration sees her lose all her empathy, even for her son. The viewer may be inclined to follow suit.