Most films about The German Democratic Republic, commonly known as East Germany, tend to be in the spy thriller variety. This makes sense, since bureaucratic backstabbing and political paranoia were more readily available than food and water behind The Iron Curtain during its heyday.
Masterful genre-bending works like 1965’s immensely influential John le Carré adaptation “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and 2006’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner “The Lives of Others” took full advantage of a bleak society where even the most close-knit families couldn’t fully trust one another in order to create truly immersive and unpredictable mysteries.
Based on Uwe Tellkamp’s novel “The Tower: Tales from a Vanished Land”, a positively reviewed best seller in Germany, “The Tower” is a two-part mini-series that attempts to bring an original angle to a story about The GDP.
By electing to present a drama instead of a spy thriller about the day-to-day lives of an East...
