“Good” begs the question of every viewer—what would you do when pressure is applied and when collaborating can seductively bring status and safety?

Professor Halder (Mortensen) comes to the attention of Nazi bigwigs because he wrote a novel raising the prospect of euthanasia as a solution for people so ill that death would be merciful. The Nazis co-opt the idea for the evil purpose of ridding society of misfits, and get the professor to write a paper that they can use along these lines. There is a harrowing scene in which Halder, now having an exalted status, visits a hospital room with Down syndrome patients and others, and one knows how these unfortunates will end up, something the professor never intended when he wrote the book and the paper.

Along the way he leaves his wife and arduous home life for a pretty woman who begins to love the high life and becomes sympathetic to the Nazi regime. Halder has had a close friend for years, Maurice, heartbreakingly played by Jason Isaacs. Maurice is Jewish, and as the noose tightens for Jews, he desperately wants to leave Germany. It is tough to get an exit pass, and when he seeks help from Halder, the professor reluctantly risks trying but without success. On a night when the Nazis demand that he participate in an onslaught against Jews in Berlin (apparently the noted, brutal Crystal Night), he seizes the opportunity to try to help Maurice again, when it is too late, and what happens leaves Halder with disgust for his wife.

There is a telling scene in which Halder is in a Nazi uniform and his wife proudly tells him to look in the mirror. He does and what he sees is something very different from what she sees. Mortensen, who acts with effective subtlety throughout, appears appalled at what he has become.

Feeling guilty about Maurice, who at their last meeting had summed up the state of their relationship as “You’re a Nazi, I’m a Jew,” Halder visits a concentration camp, and is repulsed by what he sees and who he has become by that point. One might cynically say it has taken him a long time to get to that recognition and that given his status in the hierarchy he should have known what was taking place.

“Good” doesn’t seek any misplaced sympathy for Halder, but rather looks at him as a human specimen and symbol of what so many did in Germany at the time. Yet Mortensen’s excellent acting that renders Halder a human being as well as a symbol may make one sad that a character of so much promise allowed himself to descend into a shell of a man who has in effect made his pact with the devil as a price for being part of Nazi society.