In the Fade is a 2017 German drama film written and directed by Fatih Akin. It stars Diane Kruger as a German woman whose husband and son are killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by neo-Nazis. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival,, where Kruger won the Best Actress award. It was selected as the German entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards, making the December shortlist, but it was ultimately not nominated. It did, however, win the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Plot
Several years after he spent four years in prison for drug dealing, during which time he has studied business administration and gotten married, Kurdish-German Nuri Şekerci lives happily with his German wife, Katja, and their 6-year-old son, Rocco. One day, Katja drops Rocco off at Nuri's office, a small travel agency in Hamburg where he also does translation and taxes, so she can spend the afternoon with a friend. Heading out, she warns a young blonde woman leaving her new bicycle in front of the store that it will get stolen if she doesn't lock it up. When Katja returns that night, the street is blocked off. A nail bomb has gone off, injuring dozens and killing Nuri and Rocco. Katja tells the police about the woman with the bike, which had a travel compartment. The police rule out a Jihadist motive as Nuri was neither religious nor political and initially focus on revenge by drug traffickers, though they release a composite sketch of the blonde woman. After Katja declines Nuri's parents' request to bury the bodies in Turkey, Nuri's mother coldly informs her at the funeral that her grandson would still be alive if Katja had been a better mother. Devastated, Katja uses drugs and later attempts suicide by slashing her wrists, but changes her mind and bandages them upon hearing a phone call come in that Neo-Nazi suspects have been caught. Married couple André and Edda Möller go on trial. Disgusted with his son, André's father testifies how he found bags of nails, fertilizer, and diesel in the garage, but the defense establishes that unknown people could have gained access to the garage through a hidden key. Forensics match the bomb to the material found in the garage, which bears fingerprints from the couple and an unknown individual, who could have been a store employee but who the defense claims could have been the real culprit. Nikolaos Makris, a Greek hotel owner, claims the Möllers were staying in Greece at the time of the bombing, but it is revealed he is also a member of the far-right party Golden Dawn and the Möllers liked Facebook photos of him at a rally in Germany. Katja testifies about seeing Edda outside the office but the defense calls her testimony into question by pointing out her drug use. The couple are acquitted by the court and go into hiding. Katja searches for the Möllers in Greece by finding Makris' hotel. Katja follows Makris and finds the Möllers living in an RV on the beach. She builds a nail bomb and plants it under the vehicle in a backpack, but changes her mind and retrieves it. After a few days' contemplation, she returns to the beach and sees the Möllers enter the RV. After a few moments, she enters wearing the backpack; the vehicle explodes within seconds.
Cast
Diane Kruger as Katja Şekerci, wife of Nuri and mother of Rocco
The terrorist attack in the film was loosely based on the events of the 2004 Cologne bombing, when Neo-Nazis detonated a nail bomb, also hidden above a bicycle rack, on a busy commercial street in a heavily Turkish neighborhood in Cologne. Nobody was killed in the bombing but there were nearly two dozen injuries, several critical. Filming for In the Fade began on 20 October 2016 and ended on 21 November 2016, with filming locations in Hamburg in St. Pauli and Alsterdorf, as well as in Greece, where the final scene was filmed at Schinias beach in Athens. Following Inglourious Basterds, the film was only the second major German-language role for lead actress Diane Kruger, who had moved to the United States as a teenager. While the original title translates to "Out of Nowhere" in English, the English title is taken from the song of the same name by American rock band Queens of the Stone Age, whose lead singer, Josh Homme, wrote the film's score.
Reception
, the film holds a 77% approval rating on review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes, based on 148 reviews with an average rating of 6.77/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "In the Fade proves Diane Kruger is more than up to the task of carrying a movie — even if the end result doesn't quite live up to her remarkable work." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
