Schläfer (2005)

Johannes Mehrveldt, a natural sciences researcher newly hired by an institute who also helps care for his grandmother at home, is asked by the intelligence service to keep an eye on a colleague. Farid Atabay—a supposed sleeper agent—works with him, and personal, professional, and political matters become intertwined. The opening scene shows Frau Wasser, a woman from the domestic intelligence service, trying to recruit Johannes in a park before his first day at work. He is supposed to spy on his Algerian research colleague Farid and report on him. Frau Wasser seems conventional and is nothing like the stereotype of an intelligence agent. Johannes decides against cooperating and starts work as a scientist, but from then on his view of Farid is biased. Although they are scientific rivals, the two try to cooperate and get to know each other better in their free time, over beers and while playing computer games together. When they meet the waitress Beate, Johannes falls in love with her, and Beate, Johannes, and Farid now spend their free time together more often. Later, it becomes clear that Beate gets together with Farid. In the next scenes, Johannes is shown contacting Frau Wasser at the intelligence service on his own initiative and reporting on Farid’s contacts. Johannes continues trying to win Beate over; they also have sex in the fitness studio, but it has no effect on their relationships. Despite the palpable tensions, the three continue to spend time together, although Farid is increasingly annoyed by Beate’s “attention-seeking.” In this connection, he also tells Johannes that he has been caught up in the dragnet investigation. Scenes repeatedly show Farid, for example, switching to a foreign language while talking with a colleague; it is mentioned that he has silver foil in front of his windows and that he has contacts. Johannes eventually ends his cooperation with the intelligence service. When Farid manages to publish in the academic journal “Nature,” Johannes feels cheated out of his own contribution and co-authorship, and an argument breaks out between him, his professor, and Farid. He asks Farid whether he prays, which visibly unsettles him. As radio segments make clear, an attack on a building in Munich has taken place that same evening, and Farid comes under increasing suspicion. In one scene, after saying goodbye to Johannes, Farid is overpowered by several men on his way home and taken away in a car, while Johannes watches openly but does not intervene. Johannes has the opportunity to testify to the woman from the intelligence service that he was with Farid at the time of the attack; however, he says nothing, even though the woman explicitly points out that she will interpret his silence as a no. At the institute, the professor tells him that the situation has changed as a result of the events surrounding Farid, and that the study will now be published under Johannes’s name after all. Johannes takes this in without comment. He returns home to his grandmother, who is lying motionless, and prays Psalm 23 from the Bible for her.