This film, based on real events, managed to thrill me in a way that is similar to watching a horror movie. Everything you see in the film could happen in any high school, anywhere in the world.
In the 60s of the last century, in the state of California in the United States, a social experiment called The Third Wave was carried out to study how modern societies could fall into the attraction of authoritarian policies.
In this case, the film is called The Wave and tells the story of a professor who, during a project workshop, decides to carry out an experiment to demonstrate that dictatorships can occur in modern countries today.
To answer the question whether a dictatorship is possible in today's Germany, whose society has been marked by the terrible experience of Nazi totalitarianism, Professor Rainer Wenger (played by Jürgen Vogel) turns his class into a movement of diffuse ideology, but with a strong sense of group belonging.
Rigid discipline, a mission that gives meaning to the young people's lives and a growing intolerance of dissent.
The movie is direct and surprising in its content, direct and blunt as few others. Human beings are easily alienated, they just need a leader and some basic rules.
In the film, it is easy, pleasant and full of advantages to be part of the Wave. But fanaticism, banditry, and mistrust of non-participants also start to emerge, and the experiment spirals out of control.
This story reminds us that it is not unreasonable to think that we could be moving, every day and almost without realising it, towards an autocratic, violent and dehumanised society.
We are shown the reasons for the dictatorship and its characteristics: : from the sense of belonging to a group, uniformity, emblems, identity marking, intolerance, the feeling of external threat, the denial of individualism and of what is different, and tolerance of violence. The film does not end well for the teacher or for the student who most identified with the Wave movement.
Everyone has a place in The Wave as long as they accept the rules of the group. It's a kind of fascism that overrides people as individuals and turns them into a violent gang that behaves like sheep.
The impact that this film has on me is that I identify it very much with what is happening in my country Venezuela, we are precisely living a regime that is indoctrinating the youth, replacing democratic institutions with others made to its measure, weakening opponents, modifying the constitution to its liking and its interpretation as well, where people who do not have an opinion and who do not agree with the government are thrown aside.
Die welle or The Wave is a German production from 2008, directed by Dennis Gansel, I highly recommend it as it will surely not leave anyone who sees it indifferent.