Directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”) and fussily adapted by David Hare from a slender novel by the German author Bernhard Schlink, “The Reader” is somewhat much more than a plain romance. Starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, this is definitely the kind of film you'll think about for days afterwards.

Kate Winslet dons an impressive Teutonic accent to play Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor in 1958 Germany. When 15-year-old Michael (David Kross) gets sick outside her door, she takes care of him and sends him home. A few months later he returns to thank her, and the two begin a passionate affair in which he reads classic works of literature to her (Michael reading the classics of Homer and Chekhov to Hanna, he himself matures from a gawky, insecure schoolboy to a confident, charismatic young man,) and she teaches him the ways of the world.

As the lovers separate and the story skips to the 1960s, with Michael attending law school. One day a professor (Bruno Ganz) takes him and a few other students to a court where some women are being tried for Nazi war crimes, which is how Hanna re-enters Michael’s life. During the proceedings he comes to realize her secret: she’s illiterate.

But too much content of the film was already revealed. I’d rather skip to something else regarding the matter. In the film's truest moment, a Holocaust survivor (Lena Olin) scolds a middle-age Michael (Ralph Fiennes) for seeking to purge his guilt. "Go to the theater, go to literature if you want catharsis," she says. "Don't go to the camps." It lack any trace of spirituality if revealed like this. But the message is quite clear.

The whole message of the film is clear as well: the parallel between Hanna’s illiteracy and the German’s ignorance towards the Holocaust, for instance. But the actors know what they are playing. Kate Winslet is amazing. And she looks even more amazing, even when wearing a smear of wrinkles and a little gray during the later scenes, but she’s playing an impossible character.

Ralph Fiennes has perhaps the toughest job, playing the morose adult Michael, a version, we can assume, of the author. Fiennes masters the default demeanor of someone perpetually pained. Michael supplies her with the books she painfully learns to read during her imprisonment, though he otherwise keeps her at a wary distance. Eventually, she comes to a sad and not entirely predictable ending.

But still Hannah’s case is exceptional, because historically speaking, Germany was among the most literate nations and, also, one of the most morally conscientious ones, which is why Schlink's illiteracy conceit works so well.

Nevertheless Schlink's novel, which is partly a love story and partly, among other things, meditation on the legacy of guilt in postwar Germany, is compact, direct and unsentimental, and its brevity is part of what makes it effective. But because it's a relatively short book, it needs to be padded rather than condensed to fill out a movie's runtime. So that’s why "The Reader" may leave you somewhat frustrated due to its becoming too melodramatic from time to time.