It is bugging me.
I can’t recall if this was TV or movie, I think it is recent but could well be wrong, I certainly saw it fairly recently.
The gist of it is a man is being interviewed by a secret police stasi-like man, one-to-one in a bare room. The stasi guy accuses him of murdering his wife. The man is relieved and says no, that isn’t his wife and that it is obviously a case of mistaken identity. The stasi guy says sadly that, since the state is not capable of making a mistake, the man’s actual wife must now be killed in order to confirm the state’s story. In horror the man tries to claim that actually it is his wife and he has killed her (obviously in order to let his real wife live)
I just can’t quite picture the actors and can’t quite recall what the relevance was the move/episode, it is on the tip of my mental tongue.
Help me SDMB, you’re my only hope.
No idea, but it reminds me of a bit in Mission: Impossible (the old series) where they make a terrorist who works for a dictatorial government think that he has just woken up from an accident with memory loss, decades later than the real date. He’s lead to think that he was on trial for opposing his own state as a dissident, and he needs to prove his loyalty. Since he doesn’t remember the last few decades, the only way he can prove his loyalty is to prove that he had undertaken and committed a terrorist incident back in previous times.
Of course, that then gives them the information they need to prevent the terrorist incident.
I haven’t seen all of Mission: Impossible, but the later seasons liked to go back and rework the general techniques that were used in earlier seasons, so this sounds like it could be one of those.
I think the opening of the third season of Fargo is what you’re looking for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-WTmhUQlN0
YES!
That’s it. Thanks for that. I’ve watched it again and I my memory was a little off but one the reasons I didn’t link it directly to Fargo 3 was that it did stand rather apart from the rest of the episodes. Also, I couldn’t shake Deutschland '83 out of my head and yet knew it couldn’t be that. I now realise that the rather wonderful Sylvester Groth was a stasi official in both.
Ah, the joys of access to the hive mind.