Teenager Michael Berg embarks on a brief but passionate affair with an older woman, who seeks solace from her misery in the stories he reads to her. Years later while observing the Nazi war crime trials, Michael happens across the same woman and learns she acted as an SS concentration camp guard during the Second World War. Drama, starring an Oscar-winning Kate Winslet alongside Ralph Fiennes, Jeanette Hain and David Kross.

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.