The Wave

Rainer Wenger (Vogel) is your typical liberal-minded teacher.

One of the few hipsters wearing a Ramones t-shirt who could actually name one of the trio's songs, he is regarded suspiciously at his Berlin school for being, like, down with die kinder.

It's the end of term and he's reluctantly accepted autocracy (as opposed to his chosen theme, anarchy) as the subject for a school project.

Playfully, he toys with the indifferent kids' concepts of totalitarianism and dictatorships, then makes them refer to him as Herr Wenger while reorganising the tables.

It's not exactly Nuremberg, but you get the right-veering drift as the all-too-willing students happily don white shirts (as opposed to Hitler's brownshirts) and even adopt a (rather camp) salute.

Any opposition - the level-headed Karo (Ulrich) is already drawing comparisons with the youthful militancy of the 1930s - is either allowed to leave or simply snuffed out.

It soon becomes apparent that those from grim, social backgrounds - such as the militant Tim (Lau) - are the keenest on promoting The Wave from extra-curricular hobby group to fresh-faced advocates of another Thousand Year Reich.

Soon even Wenger finds himself seduced by the kids' bright-eyed adoration and audiences will pray for the arrival of a para-military OFSTED inspector to squash this neo-fascist nonsense.

This fictional retelling of the 1967 experiment conducted by Californian history teacher William  Ron Jones is well served by slick direction from Dennis Gansel,  economically sketching in the pupils' motivations and fears.

Ulrich is standout and Lau also impresses as the authoriarian convert who goes off the rails with the prospect of The Wave collapsing.

However, the finale is a dramatically unconvincing, emotional blitzkrieg when a more muted, less contrived conclusion would have satisfied.

Nevertheless, as a disturbing indictment of the course that could be taken by disaffected youth, The Wave makes a big splash.

Tim Evans