Kate strikes again

The Reader is a poignant story of love, humanity, pride, dignity, shame and sacrifice. A well narrated story of how one moment a person could be so simple and yet hidden under the exterior a hidden truth forgotten and buried with the past. Mostly a tale in flashback coming up to the present, it shows how Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) recollects his youth spent having a torrid affair with an older woman Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) and how later on he can’t seem to bring himself to defend her with one truth that only he is privy to when she is standing trial for being accused of genocide, as one of the five Guards at a Nazi Concentration Camp.

The Young Michael Berg (David Kross) is fond of reading and Hanna always makes him read to her. This key element is also brought up in the trial in a very negative aspect, but only then does Michael realise that Hanna is illiterate and cannot read or write. This could have saved her, but she is sentenced, the rest of the story entails him sending her recordings of books he used to read to her in his youth and how she finally learns to write, but all in vain when she finally kills herself due to the guilt of having being part of such a heinous crime during WWII.

This movie is a must watch just to see Kate Winslet acting.