The young researcher Dr. Franz Walter enters a Faustian pact with the GDR state authorities when he agrees to work for the foreign intelligence services in exchange for a professorship and private privileges. He realises much too late with whom and what he has got himself into – with deadly consequences.

The early 1970s in the GDR: Dr. Franz Walter, a career-oriented scientist, receives a tempting offer from the foreign intelligence service of the GDR Ministry of State Security. In return for a professorship, the capable analyst and football fan is assigned to a football star who defected to West Germany in the run-up to the 1974 World Cup. But as much as the joint business trips to the West with his colleague Dirk Hartmann and the chic new apartment initially bring him (and his wife, Corina) delight, the escalating espionage activities soon appear questionable and the extortionate methods of his superiors immoral. Franz Walter tries to back out, but it is long too late to leave – and the film's [German] title reveals the end: death sentences by "Nahschuss", an unexpected shot in the back of the neck, were still conducted in the GDR until 1981. The claustrophobic and gripping film is loosely based on the story of Dr. Werner Teske, the last person to be executed in the GDR.

Frederik Lang (30.11.2021)

Reviews and commentary:

"In the courtroom towards the end, Franz Walter is asked whether he had to or wanted to. At this point, he is already accused of attempted espionage and desertion. Have to or want to? In principal, this question runs through the entire film. The question of free will. The decision for or against the paths of life that open up in front of you. All the while never knowing whether you are in the right place at the right time, or in the wrong place at the wrong time. After all: how free is one from the constraints of a political system?"
(Annett Scheffel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12.8.2021)

"But enlightenment is only one side of this perfectly set and designed film (filmed in the former Stasi headquarters in Hohenschönhausen, among other places). It concerns itself with Walter's personal entanglements, with the mechanics of the increasing pressure he senses around him – including his own guilt, of which he increasingly becomes aware. Walter is not completely lacking in scruples, unlike his colleague Dirk (who as a result sometimes comes across as too Mephistophelian); indeed, at times Walter comes across as if he may be unstable. [...] With The Last Execution, Stünkel has produced a movie that is as haunting as it is impressive [...]. She has her by all means prominent actors well under control, plying the necessary understatement from even Lars Eidinger – who, by the way, is perfectly cast in the role. The tragedy and melancholy, however, that a different debut film about the Stasi, The Lives of Others, sought in its perpetrators is completely absent to The Last Execution. Here, the figures are just cogs in a misanthropic apparatus of intimidation."
(Rudolf Worschech, epd Film, 23.7.2021)

"However, as detailed as The Last Execution may be researched, it is also another contribution to the cinematic division of Germany. It is a Western production. Franziska Stünkel, the director and screenwriter, comes from Göttingen; Lars Eidinger grew up in West Berlin; the other actors of importance are products of the West (with the exception of Striesow, who was given the meanest role); the producers stem from Western biotopes.
Now, one should not be a slave of the identity trap in accordance to which only gays are allowed to play gays and only Swabians Swabians, and films about the GDR should only come from the new federal states. But it is impossible not to notice that a certain perspective is still bound to the origin, and that the East has little use for the Western fixation on Stasi stories and the West has little use for the Eastern insistence that one was able to manage quite well under the real, existing socialism. It is, in the end, the debate about the (il)legitimate state, and it is also held in the cinema.
After three decades of pan-German films about the defunct GDR, it must be stated: the division of Germany continues unabated in the cinematic view of the worker and farmer state."
(Hanns-Georg Rodek, Die Welt, 12.8.2021)

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

2019/2020

Production Year

2021

color

color

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Justice, Violence, Love, Relationship / Family, Work, GDR, Socialism / Communism, Democracy / Human Rights

Available Media

DCP, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, Digital Film

Original Version

German (de)

DCP

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian (ru), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Czech (cs), Polish (pl), Turkish (tr)

Note on the Format

DCP sind verschlüsselt.

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Russian (ru), Chinese (zh), Polish (pl), Czech (cs)

DVD

Subtitles

German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Russian (ru), Chinese (zh), Polish (pl), Czech (cs)

Note on the Format

DVD-Auswertungszeit: ab September 2022

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

Turkish (tr)

Digital Film

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Russian (ru), Polish (pl), Czech (cs), Chinese (short), Turkish (tr), Serbian (sr)