Just a year after his wildly experimental literary biopic Limonov: The Ballad (2024) debuted in Cannes competition, maverick Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov is back with another powerhouse portrait of an even more controversial figure from history, former SS physician and fugitive Nazi Josef Mengele.
Nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, Mengele conducted grotesque experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp, treating humans as laboratory rats, then casually sending them to be killed. After the war, he evaded capture and fled to South America, where he was sheltered by shadowy networks of Nazi sympathizers. But as his notoriety began to spread, he became a high-profile target for Mossad and CIA agents.
A former political prisoner, critic of Putin and vocal opponent of the war in Ukraine, Serebrennikov is one of few Russian directors to escape the widespread festival embargo on Russian films and film-makers. Now self-exiled in Europe, his two most recent features have been European co-productions. Adapted from the prize-winning 2017 “non-fiction novel” of the same name by French journalist Olivier Guez, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is less formally inventive than Limonov, but still a gutsy and finely crafted piece of work, part history lesson and part cautionary message for a new era when far-right racist demagogues are on the rise again.
As a relentlessly dour character study of an arrogant, irascible, fiercely unrepentant Nazi, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is obviously a long way removed from heart-warming entertainment. Its time-jumping narrative structure becomes a little ungainly at times, while some of the baldly explanatory dialogue lacks finesse. That said, August Diehl gives a muscular and multi-layered star performance as Mengele, requiring him to age over almost 40 years, even managing to make us feel a little sympathy for the devil. Shooting mostly in lustrous monochrome, Serebrennikov and his team also couch the film in gorgeous visuals, making impressive use of the director’s signature balletic single-shot long takes and elegantly choreographed set-pieces. It is a gruelling watch at times, inevitably, but consistently compelling and frequently beautiful.
With its nervy black-and-white aesthetic, The Disappearance of Joseph Mengele borrows heavily from the grammar of film noir. The elusive anti-hero lurks in the shadows, always on edge, frequently on the run, forever haunted by fears that he will be captured by his enemies and finally forced to face justice. Spoiler alert: he gets away with it. As anyone even even casually interested in Nazi war crimes will already know, the real Mengele was never caught, instead dying in Brazil in 1979 after decades living in exile under multiple fake names. Indeed, his body was only identified years after his death, using DNA samples. His post-war biography was then slowly pieced together from various diaries, letters and insider accounts.
We first see Mengele fleeing Buenos Aires in 1955, just as Argentina’s fascist-friendly Peron regime is collapsing. A lavishly filmed sequence revisits his brief, risky return to Germany in 1956, where he reconnects with his ultra-conservative family and home-town coterie of unreformed Nazi gargoyles. Another visually dazzling chapter, framed in fluid long shots, shows Mengele marrying his second wife Martha (Frederike Becht) in 1958 in a grand Uruguayan mansion brazenly festooned with swastika decorations. By 1960, he is alone again and hiding out on a remote cattle ranch in Brazil, growing increasingly paranoid while pursuing a combustible secret affair with the wife of the exiled Hungarian couple who run the farm, Gitta Stemmer (Annamaria Lang), despite frequently berating both of them for their racial inferiority.
Serving as a loose narrative thread throughout the film, and allowing viewers at least one vaguely sympathetic character, are recurring two-hander vignettes from a 1977 reunion between Mengele and his grown-up son Rolf (Max Brettschneider) in Brazil, the sickly father defending his blood-soaked track record to his unconvinced offspring. Between unhinged diatribes on “racial hygiene” and “social Darwinism”, Mengele complains he has been unfairly demonised among many other doctors who worked for the Nazi regime. “Remorse is a sickness invented by the weak.” he sneers. “Auschwitz was a very profitable enterprise, but nobody wants to hear that now…”
Though they occupy only a small segment of the film, Mengele’s Auschwitz crimes are the heart of the story. Midway through the post-war narrative, Serebrennikov changes gear with a vivid, striking flashback set in the infamous Nazi extermination camp. Jumping to saturated colour, and framed as a montage of home movie footage, this sequence shows the young doctor cheerfully picking out freshly arrived human specimens from transport trains, experimenting on severely disabled inmates, then casually murdering them and coolly stripping their bones of flesh. In a bravura piece of editing, this whole interlude is artfully framed within a mournful musical performance by an orchestra of dwarf prisoners, a surreal poetic flourish rooted in Mengele’s real-life medical interest in dwarves.
The Auschwitz chapter also depicts Mengele in his newly married prime, with a blossoming career, a bright future, and a carefree home life full of sunshine and sex. There are echoes here of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), contrasting the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust with the banal domestic contentment of the Nazi officials committing them. But Serebrennikov does not avert his gaze, or ours, from the abyss. Instead he paints ghastly snapshots of Nazi mass murder in ironically bright colours to reflect Mengele’s own twisted memories of the camp as a happy, liberating, personal career peak. It is a bold stylistic decision, underscoring how this story is not just a noir-tinged chase thriller but also a chilling true-crime horror film about one of history’s most prolific serial killers.
Director, screenwriter: Kirill Serebrennikov
Cast: August Diehl, Max Brettschneider, David Ruland, Frederike Becht, Mirco Kreibich, Dana Herfurth, Karoly Hajdyk, Falk Rockstroh, Annamaria Lang, Thilo Werner
Cinematography: Vladislav Opelyants
Editing: Hansjörg Weissbrich
Production designer: Vladislav Ogay
Art director: Liubov Korolkova
Costume designer: Tatiana Dolmatovskaya
Music: Ilya Demutsky
Producers: Charles Gillbert, Ilya Stewart, Kirill Serebrennikov, Julio Chavezmontes, Felix Von Boehm, Yan Vizinberg Abigail Honor, Chris Copper, Mélanie Biessy
Production companies: Hype Studio, CG Cinéma, Lupa Films, Arte France Cinéma, Scala Films, Forma Pro Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première)
In German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian
136 minutes
