THE STORY – A fictionalised biopic of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who fakes his death and flees to South America, after the end of World War II.
THE CAST – August Diehl, Max Bretschneider, Dana Herfurth, Friederike Becht, Mirco Kriebich, David Ruland, Annamaria Lang & Tilo Werner
THE TEAM – Kirill Serebrennikov (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 135 Minutes
Screening as a Cannes Premiere at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, this fictionalized biopic of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele – known as “the Angel of Death” – from Russian writer-director Kirill Serebrennikov is based on the novel by Olivier Guez. It marks the director’s seventh appearance on the Croisette, following “Limonov – The Ballad” in 2024. Shot almost entirely in high contrast black-and-white Scope, the film begins in present-day Sao Paolo, with a biology teacher telling his class that the skeleton they are examining used to belong to SS doctor Josef Mengele. While filling the class in on Mengele’s history – known as “the Angel of Death,” he was responsible for horrifying human experiments in concentration camps – the doctor notes that a pair of identical twins in the class would have held a particular fascination for Mengele, a fact that will be important for later.
The film then flashes back to Brazil in 1953, where Mengele (August Diehl) is in hiding, having faked his death and fled Germany shortly after the end of World War II. The film is nominally split into three chapters, each one named after one of Mengele’s aliases (Gregor, Pedro, etc) and corresponding to a different country and time period. However, Serebrennikov doesn’t exactly stick to his own structure, as the narrative frequently switches between multiple time periods within those chapters.
In the 1950s section, an increasingly paranoid Mengele attempts to travel back to Europe. Eventually, he reunites with a group of Nazi party loyalists – including his father (Burghart Klaussner) – and they discuss the continuation of the Third Reich, their belief in their own ideology resolutely unaffected by their resounding defeat in the War.
Serebrennikov’s not-so-subtle point, increasingly relevant for today’s troubled times, is that Nazism took different forms after the War, something that is further underlined in the film’s other settings and time periods, such as Argentina, under the Peron regime and military controlled-Brazil in the 1970s. Throughout the film, we are constantly reminded of the continued presence of fascists by frequent news and radio broadcasts in the background of scenes.
The later time period takes a slightly different focus, as Mengele’s adult son Rolf (Max Bretschneider) attempts to get the truth out of his father, in a perverse illustration of the classic question, “What did you do during the War, Daddy?” To that end, the audience constantly expects some remorse or acknowledgment of his own actions from Mengele. Still, the closest Serebrennikov allows is an ambiguous vomit scene, which is less than satisfying.
The film’s boldest move is its only color sequence, which amounts to home movie-style footage of the gruesome and gory experiments Mengele performed in the camps. This decision arguably backfires, in poor taste at best, and deliberately provocative at worst. After all, it’s not like the audience for a film about Josef Mengele needs convincing that the Nazis were bad guys.
Diehl is excellent as Mengele, whether relatively fresh-faced in the 1950s scenes or laboring under prosthetic make-up in the later sequences. Commendably, neither the film nor Diehl makes any attempt to humanize Mengele, leaving us in no doubt that he was an utter monster. Indeed, in the later sections of the film, Mengele’s dogged unrepentance becomes something of a very dark running joke. Someone even makes the mistake of teasing him about it – quipping “You’ll be next” when the news runs the story of Eichmann being hanged – which brings forth a comically apoplectic rant from Mengele that’s reminiscent of the much-memed bunker scene from “Downfall.” Elsewhere, Bretschneider does strong work as Rolf, Klaussner is suitably disturbing as Mengele’s Nazi dad, and Annamaria Lang and Tilo Werner are both excellent as a Hungarian couple who host Mengele in their house and make no effort to hide their contempt. However, Dana Herfurth and Friederike Becht are rather underserved as Mengele’s various wives, and it’s a shame those characters weren’t a little more rounded. On a related note, the film is fairly detailed when it comes to Mengele’s sex life – there’s frequent nudity (male and female), and the various sex scenes are played for black humor (Mengele sleeping with the wife of his host), drama and pathos (an elderly Mengele failing to rise to the occasion while getting a handjob from his Brazilian housekeeper).
Vladislav Opelyants’ cinematography is striking throughout, full of appropriately murky shadows, suggesting Mengele can never truly escape the darkness surrounding him. The production design work is also top-notch (a tiny swastika on a birthday cake is a nicely macabre detail), while the score by Ilya Demutsky is suitably atmospheric. However, the decision to layer lovely classical music over the horrific color sequence jars with the rest of the film.
This is an engaging historical drama with a compellingly dark central performance. Still, its central message is reasonably blunt, and a couple of the filmmaking decisions backfire – the fractured narrative adds nothing to the story, while the atrocious color sequence feels needlessly provocative.
