Directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Starring Barbara Sukowa and Axel Milberg. In English, German, and Hebrew with English subtitles. Unrated. Opens Friday, June 28, at the Vancity Theatre

Born in Berlin during the Second World War, Margarethe von Trotta has spent her career illuminating dark corners of the European psyche. And Rainer Werner Fassbinder veteran Barbara Sukowa gives her a perfect vehicle to deliver the uniquely focused perspective of Hannah Arendt, the ornery political theorist whose coverage of the 1961 Adolph Eichmann trial—and meditations on “the banality of evil”—forever coloured modern views of the Holocaust.

With the top Nazis dead or being “reformed” as anti-Communists, and the victims mostly still too traumatized to speak, the Israeli capture of Eichmann in 1960 and his subsequent trial, in Jerusalem, offered a major opportunity to confront the “Final Solution”. New Yorker editor William Shawn (father of actor Wallace, and here played effectively by Nicholas Woodeson) seized that moment to commission a five-parter from New York–based Arendt, a secular German Jew who had earlier studied with philosopher (and future quasi-Nazi) Martin Heidegger, and was his lover, as seen in somewhat unnecessary flashbacks.

Written by the director with Pam Katz—whose 2011 Remembrance has a similar tone and trajectory—the film is overly expository, especially in early scenes with Axel Milberg as Arendt’s professorial husband. It also makes the sentimental mistake of caricaturing her critics, who multiplied when the article characterized Eichmann (perhaps naively) as a soulless authoritarian, not a monster.

Hannah is still engaging, though, especially when focusing on the lifelong friendship between Arendt and Mary McCarthy, played by a lively Janet McTeer. Aside from smoking themselves to death, the middlebrow Catholic novelist (The Group) and the uncompromising author of Life of the Mind (which McCarthy edited) had a balancing act. In fact, von Trotta could have made a movie about that.