Dir: Felix Randau | Thriller 2026 95’
Historical truth is rarely neat, and Felix Randau’s Ich bin ein anderer embraces ambiguity with unusual confidence. Premiering at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, this engrossing hybrid of political thriller, wartime drama and psychological character study revisits the extraordinary, deeply disputed legacy of Felix Kersten, the Finnish masseur whose miraculous hands eased Heinrich Himmler’s chronic pain and allegedly enabled him to save thousands of Jews and concentration camp prisoners from almost certain death.
Whether Kersten was an unsung humanitarian or a gifted self-publicist has divided historians for decades. Randau has little interest in settling the argument. Instead, he constructs a gripping investigation into how history itself is assembled, exposing the uneasy territory where documented fact, personal testimony and myth overlap.
The narrative unfolds aboard a train travelling through post-war Europe in 1952, as Kersten journeys to Norway hoping to receive official recognition for his wartime efforts. What begins as an elegant period drama gradually assumes the mechanics of a first-rate railway thriller. Each compartment, each encounter and each interruption introduces fresh doubts about Kersten’s extraordinary claims. The enclosed setting generates mounting suspense as competing versions of the past collide, transforming a seemingly straightforward journey into an absorbing duel between memory and evidence.
Claes Bang delivers a career-best performance as the enigmatic Kersten. Immaculately controlled, he never allows the audience the comfort of certainty. His Kersten is charismatic and quietly persuasive, but beneath the polished exterior lies an unsettling opacity. Every anecdote could be an act of generosity or an exercise in calculated self-fashioning. Bang understands that the character’s greatest weapon is ambiguity itself.
Valerie Pachner provides the film’s moral counterweight as the journalist determined to verify Kersten’s remarkable story. Her performance is marked by intelligence and restraint, avoiding easy scepticism while allowing genuine curiosity to develop into profound ethical uncertainty. Their verbal sparring gives the film much of its dramatic electricity.
Randau (known for his daring 2017 docudrama Iceman) punctuates the train journey with dramatised wartime flashbacks depicting Kersten’s encounters with Himmler and other senior Nazi figures. These sequences are chilling precisely because they resist melodrama. Himmler is presented not as an operatic villain but as the terrifyingly mundane architect of industrialised murder, making Kersten’s improbable intimacy with him all the more morally disquieting. The flashbacks never function as definitive historical reconstruction; instead they remain coloured by the possibility that they are memories shaped by self-interest, guilt or imperfect recollection.
Visually, the film balances elegance with quiet menace. The polished wood and muted luxury of the railway carriages evoke post-war Europe attempting to restore order, while the colder palette of the wartime sequences carries an atmosphere of bureaucratic horror rather than battlefield spectacle. The measured pacing allows the tension to accumulate through dialogue and implication instead of action, rewarding patient viewers with steadily deepening intrigue.
Rather than offering another conventional Second World War drama, Ich bin ein anderer interrogates the seductive appeal of heroic narratives themselves. It asks whether extraordinary acts of rescue can emerge through deeply compromised relationships with evil, and whether history can ever fully separate courage from opportunism. The film never diminishes the horrors of the Holocaust; instead it explores the uncomfortable moral compromises that sometimes accompanied survival and resistance within the machinery of the Nazi state.
The unanswered questions surrounding Felix Kersten have endured for generations, and Randau wisely leaves them unresolved. In doing so, he delivers one of the festival’s most intellectually stimulating works: a sophisticated historical mystery that trusts audiences to wrestle with uncertainty long after the final frame. In an era increasingly drawn to clear-cut heroes and villains, Ich bin ein anderer argues persuasively that history is often far stranger, and far more elusive, than certainty allows.
PIAZZA GRANDE SECTION Locarno 2026