‘The Disappearance Of Josef Mengele’ review: Kirill Serebrennikov’s drama tracks post-War life of the SS ‘Angel of Death’

Dir. Kirill Serebrennikov. France/Germany 2025. 136mins

Josef Mengele was the doctor and SS officer whose horrific experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz earned him the sobriquet ‘Angel of Demise’. A fictionalised account of his profession may simply lead a film-maker into sensationalism, but it surely’s a lure that Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov avoids – up to a degree.

Revolves round an imposing lead by a largely unrecognisable August Diehl

Primarily based on the novel by Olivier Guez and debuting as a Cannes Premiere, The Disappearance Of Josef Mengele shows the brio and ambition attribute of Serebrennikov, though the movie is in a markedly completely different mode from earlier stylised workouts; notably Leto, Tchaikovsky’s Spouse and final yr’s freewheeling biopic Limonov. Disappearance revolves round an imposing lead – typically refined, typically a contact barnstorming – by a largely unrecognisable August Diehl. Whereas the movie is a contact unwieldy at two hours plus, its stylishly executed espionage thriller mode ought to make this probably the most commercially interesting movie but from the auteur filmmaker.

Shot nearly fully in black-and-white Scope, the movie concentrates largely on Mengele’s post-war existence in South America. On-screen captions divide the story into three chapters, constructed round completely different pseudonyms of the fugitive Nazi – however because the narrative zigzags between eras and areas, it doesn’t break down fairly so neatly. The movie may also be seen as exhibiting occasions from two contrasting views: that of Mengele and his grownup son Rolf (Max Brettschneider), who comes to go to his aged father in Brazil to demand the reality about his crimes.

Mengele’s personal travels embody his surreptitious post-war go to to his household house in Germany, the place, collectively along with his father (Burghart Klaussner) and different Nazi loyalists, he discusses the long-term undertaking of the Third Reich – one thing they regard as having solely been inconveniently interrupted. In Argentina, Nazis flourish underneath the regime of the Perons, as seen at a luxurious nation home the place Mengele is celebrating his marriage to his former sister-in-law Martha (Frederike Becht).

Later, he’s more and more an outsider, arrested and questioned for illicit medical practices in South America, and finally hunted as a conflict felony. The prolonged penultimate part exhibits him residing on a farm in Brazil with a Hungarian couple, Gitta (Annamaria Lang) and Geza Stammer (Thelio Werner), and proving the worst home visitor conceivable: ranting on the desk, sleeping with Gitta, cursing the paprika-heavy weight loss program.

By and enormous, The Disappearance… builds up a restrained portrayal of a Nazi sociopath satisfied {that a} briefly triumphant ideology makes him altogether regular, certainly virtuous. The movie does, nevertheless, fall into the clichéd cinema place of assuming that Nazis solely ever wish to speak about Nazism, leaving Mengele and his associates coming throughout as a gang of grandiloquent bores.

Serebrennikov additionally makes the error of encouraging Diehl – particularly as Mengele will get older and testier – to go full blast with the sort of Hitlerian raging that it’s now arduous to dissociate from Bruno Ganz’s immortal efficiency in Downfall. It’s additionally notable that the ladies in Mengele’s life, together with his first spouse Irene (Dana Herfurth), barely emerge as fully-fleshed characters – the exception being Gitta, sharply depicted by Lang as cynical and loftily resentful.

Essentially the most critical lapse, nevertheless, is an prolonged flashback in vivid color, partly in pastiche home-movie type, to Mengele’s actions in Auschwitz. This should depend as one in every of cinema’s most disturbingly graphic depictions of focus camp atrocities. The motive is clearly to unveil the horrific actuality of what Mengele depicts as analysis for the good thing about a wholesome society (a wholesome all-Aryan society, that’s). Nonetheless, the borderline-kitsch horror-movie extra of those sequences really feel extreme and intrusive, as soon as once more elevating the recurrent query of what it’s ethically acceptable to point out in fictional depictions of the Holocaust.

General, it is a fascinating work, if not fully profitable – though Vladyslav Opelyants’s cinematography is an outright tour de drive with its sinuous prolonged takes. Ilya Demutsky’s rating, heavy on dissonant strings and horns, tensely evokes the mindstate of a protagonist on an extended, spiralling path to break down.

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