[3] The film was selected as the German entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, but it did not make the shortlist.

Reiser eventually tells her a story (the veracity of which she questions) of how he too had lost his job at a more prestigious hospital in Berlin – he was responsible for an accident with an incubator that left two premature infants blind.

During her recovery, Stella develops a strong attachment to Barbara, whose welcome bedside manner includes reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to her.

When she meets him for a second rendezvous in an "Interhotel" (an East German hotel for foreigners), he tells her of his completed plan for her escape the following weekend: she will be picked up in a small boat in the Baltic Sea and taken the short distance to Denmark.

As Barbara spends more time working with Reiser, he begins making romantic overtures, which she rebuffs although she is intrigued by and attracted to him.

One day before her planned escape, Barbara is on duty caring for a critically ill patient named Mario, whose suicide attempt had resulted in his being hospitalized.

Reiser persuades her to return to the hospital – the same night of her planned escape – so that he can perform the surgery, with her assistance as anaesthesiologist during the operation.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Smart, solidly crafted, and thoroughly gripping, Barbara offers a deliberately paced, subtly powerful character study.

For more than a decade Mr. Petzold has been making his mark on the international cinema scene with smart, tense films that resemble psychological thrillers, but are distinguished by their strange story turns, moral thorns, visual beauty and filmmaking intelligence.

"[10] In the Chicago Sun-Times, Sheila O'Malley concluded "This is well-trod ground for Petzold, but never has it been so fully realized, so palpable, as in 'Barbara.