When his students, the third generation after the Second World War,[3] do not believe that a dictatorship could be established in modern Germany, he starts an experiment to demonstrate how easily the masses can be manipulated.

Although he declines his offer, Wenger still invites Tim in for dinner; this puts further strain on his already tense relationship with his wife, Anke, who thinks his experiment has gone too far.

Karo and Mona, denied entry to the competition by members of The Wave, sneak in another way in order to distribute anti-Wave fliers.

Seeing the movement falling apart right in front of his very eyes, Tim suffers a mental breakdown and pulls out a gun, refusing to accept the Wave is over as he does not want to lose all that he's gained.

Utterly consumed by despair, Tim abruptly shoots himself in the head, preferring to commit suicide than go on living without the movement.

Because his students did not understand how something like National Socialism could even happen, he founded a totalitarian, strictly-organized "movement" with harsh punishments that was led by him autocratically.

To eliminate the upcoming momentum, Jones aborted the project on the fifth day and showed the students the parallels towards the Nazi youth movements.

[9] As a consequence, Todd Strasser, whose novel popularized the material in Germany, and the publisher Ravensburg, did not receive direct revenues from the film project.

Nonetheless, Gansel claimed in an interview that it was extremely important to him to ensure that his movie would not differ as much from the experiment as Strasser's book.

Thereby he described Jones, who supported the film project as a counselor, as a "living certificate" of authenticity and that the ending was inspired by the Emsdetten school shooting.

[6] According to Gansel, representatives of the Bavarian film-funding agency which were initially inquired to fund the film project declined because they compared it to Strasser's novel.

Gansel himself had felt an oversaturation during his schooldays and had developed an emotional connection to this chapter of German history only after watching the film Schindler's List.

[9] One difference between the experiment conducted at the time in the United States and today's Germany he saw in the fact that the American students had asked themselves quite horrified how there could even exist something like the concentration camps.

His film, however, was made on the premise that people felt immune to the possibility of a repetition of history as a result of the intensive study of National Socialism and its mechanisms.

However, in the Third Reich the house caretaker was just as fascinated by the movement as was the intellectual.”[13] The small town the movie is set in is prosperous and does not show any salient social or economic problems and the teacher practices a liberal lifestyle.

He claims that in between high-brow cinema, as films by Christian Petzold, and the entertaining comedies by Til Schweiger there was a vast gap in Germany, which urgently had to be filled.

[14] He made the film in a way that should have a “seductive effect” on the viewers to make them interested in The Wave and by doing so show the powerful attraction such a movement can have.

[18] His script co-author Thorwarth emphasized that it is necessary to define the characters very clearly in order to retain the common thread despite the variety.

[15] Gansel justifies the drastic end with the necessity of shocking the audience after the length of the film, of providing a counter-statement and of taking up a stance.

“From the first scene on, the sympathetic guy tears the audience on his side”,[19] it was reported about Jürgen Vogel, he was transforming the moral ambiguity of his figure into a “mercurial energy”.

[16] For the young actors the most frequently used word was “convincing”,[7][20][23] while the 18-year-old Frederick Lau in his role as the outcast Tim received special highlighting.

[10] According to the lack of depth in their motives and emotions, they seem to be distanced, the critics argued further, especially Karo's transformation from the enthusiastic participant to the aggressive opponent is not comprehensible.

[23] The critics don't see a stringent necessity for the students, why they should join the movement at all, because their commitment to conformity is not imaginable in West Germany today.

[23] Why the teacher, established as an authority person, becomes a victim of his own staged role play, “remains puzzling“, the critics claim.

Because Gansel attributes a position as a left-winger and former squatter to him, he involuntarily provides further evidence for the Götz Aly's thesis, that the 68er Bewegung have further developed the authoritarian body of thought of the Nazis of 1933, they argued critically.

[19] Other critics accused the movie of being conventionally staged, similar to a Tatort-police procedural TV series,[25] or let off steam about the "graffiti-scenes and a nearly never-ending escalating party scene.

Jan Plewka wrote and recorded a song for the film, Was Dich So Verändert Hat, in both a German and English version.

For example, Rainer Wenger, Karo, Marco, Mona, and Tim correspond to Ben Ross, Laurie Saunders, David Collins, Andrea, and Robert Billings.

The outsider theme was expanded by introducing three new characters: Sinan who is Turkish, Kevin the aggressive bully, and Dennis from East Germany who is mocked as "Ossi".

The movie was also shortlisted for an Oscar nomination in the category Best Foreign Language Film, but lost out to The Baader Meinhof Complex.