Reckoning with Germany’s fascist past holds new urgency as it threatens, more and more each day, to become America’s future. And so Fatherland carries weight as both lament and lesson. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, who resumes the square aspect ratio and clarifying black-and-white film stock of Ida, Fatherland dramatizes a 1949 speaking tour that Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Thomas Mann conducted across the country from which he had fled, negotiating both the unrepentant consumerism coursing through the American-influenced West and the tight, collective grip held in the Soviet-influenced East. This Mann, played by Hanns Zischler, sees no viable future with either. Zischler brings a grave, imposing seriousness, while Sandra Huller, as his accompanying daughter Erika, carries the emotional weight of both a fractured country and family—the latter involving her distraught brother Klaus (August Diehl). It all coalesces in a shuddering final shot that would be cathartic, except that Fatherland, in 2026, feels like a harbinger of the future.
(10/20/2026)
