Alexander Fehling (Heike Ullrich/Sony Pictures Classics)

This month brings us two doggedly determined movie lawyers based on real people who took on cases that nobody else wanted. Next week, it’s Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama Bridge of Spies; this week it’s prosecutor Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling, whom you might recognize from Inglorious Bastards) in Labyrinth of Lies. This by-the-numbers procedural occasionally veers to movie-of-the-week territory, but its strong cast and taut direction overcomes a sometimes expository script.

We meet Johann in the middle of an ordinary traffic court case. Marlene (Friederike Becht) doesn’t have enough money to pay a traffic fine, but a lenient judge moved by a pretty face is willing to look the other way and reduce the amount. Johann won’t have it, standing by the principle of law and demanding the full amount. He ends up paying the fine out of his own pocket as Marlene walks away in a huff, but this isn’t the last time they meet.

Set in the late ‘50s, the film is about a nation that looks the other way. Journalist Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski) approaches Johann’s sterile, modern office building with the news that an old Berlin schoolteacher has been recognized as a camp commander at Auschwitz, but none of the other prosecutors care. Johann tracks down the schoolteacher and takes the case, which eventually leads to interviews with hundreds of Auschwitz survivors and dozens of Nazi officials.

If this sounds like the setup for a dry, harrowing courtroom drama, the film doesn’t go back to the courtroom after that innocuous traffic ticket; it ends as the 20-month long Frankfurt Auschwitz trial begins. Labyrinth of Lies follows Johann as he courts Marlene and hunts down the big fish (Joseph Mengele, who lived his remaining days in Brazil), but the quest for grand principles and justice becomes a question of practicality when he has to settle for lower-level commanders.

Although the film never shows you the horrors of the concentration camps, it can still be difficult to listen to. As witnesses explain what they saw at Auschwitz and talk of Mengele’s atrocities, you understand why the film’s characters may burst into tears.

Johann eventually learns the hard lesson that nobody’s hands are untainted, but it’s a discovery you see coming. The film is predictable and not without flaws. There’s an unfortunately campy moment when the elderly Berlin schoolteacher smacks a student on the back of the head like a cartoon villain. The film’s score opens with the kind of banal theme you expect to hear in a TV-movie. But does this merely suggest the banality of evil? Labyrinth of Lies is the directorial debut of Italian actor Giulio Ricciarelli, and he deftly navigates a bureaucratic maze where a younger generation hasn’t even heard of Auschwitz and an older generation wants to forget it. Johann doesn’t want to let anybody forget Auschwitz, but in the process of making a nation face the history they want to ignore, he is forced to face a history he can’t ignore.

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Labyrinth of Lies
Directed by Giulio Ricciarelli
Written by Elisabeth Bartel and Giulio Ricciarelli
With André Szymanski, Alexander Fehling, Friederike Becht
Rated R for a scene of sexuality, but the recital of atrocities isn’t for the squeamish either.
Running time 122 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema