Dir/Wri. Kirill Serebrennikov | Cast: August Diehl, Max Brettschneider, Dana Herfurth, Frederike Becht | Thriller | France/Germany 2025. 136’
Josef Mengele was the infamous ‘Angel of Death’ and SS officer who performed ghastly experiments on Jewish prisioners in Auschwitz during the Second World War.
His grim but compelling story is rich with dramatic potential and Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov could certainly have gone for the jugular with a melodrama of epic proportions but here takes a minimal approach focusing on the post-war years of the physician’s life; The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is fabulous to watch with its stylish black and white images but less successful on the structural front and overstays its welcome at over two hours.
August Diehl gets a darkly saturnine makeover for the part of the doctor, who emerges – unsurprisingly – a fraught character with an explosive temper once he becomes a fugitive in South America, based on the novel by Olivier Guez.
This muscular noir thriller is certainly Serebrennikov’s most accessible work to date. Divided into three chapters and infused with a palpable sense of place it unfolds from various perspectives reflecting Mengele’s quixotic personality as he blows hot and cold over his tumultuous past, his troubled relationship with his adult son Rolf (Max Brettschneider), who acts as a foil to probe and unveil his sociopathic crimes against humanity, and a former wife Irene (Herfurth) an underwritten character who hardly gets a look in.
Mengele also visits the family home in Germany where his father (Burghart Klaussner) joins him along with other Nazi supporters expressing their self-righteous indignation at having had to abandon the Third Reich project. Many Nazis managed to flee to Argentina where they are welcomed by the anti-semitic Peron regime, and here, in an opulent mansion, Mengele is pictured celebrating his marriage to his former sister-in-law Martha (Frederike Becht). For a time he appears to have got away scot-free.
But eventually the past catches up with him. The doctor is arrested and interrogated by Mossad and CIA Agents about his illicit medical practices in Argentina and this proves to be the thin end of the wedge. Eventually, as a white-haired curmudgeon, he unravels while living in a farm in Brazil as the house guest from Hell for a Hungarian couple Gitta (Annamaria Lang) and Geza Stammer (Thelio Werner). But these scenes are overlong and unpleasant to watch as Mengele holds forth in raucous temper tirades. And what is even more disturbing is the graphic depiction of the gruesome experiments he performed – all in florid technicolor – that go to illustrate just how nefarious the Nazis were in their perpetrated destruction of non-Aryans. @MeredithTaylor
VIENNALE FILM FESTIVAL 2025 | PREMIERED AT VENICE 2025