The aching black-and-white, the Academy aspect ratio, the streak of fatalism running between dueling identities — you know when you’re in a Pawel Pawlikowski movie. His latest, “Fatherland,” takes us on a melancholy road trip from U.S.-operated Frankfurt to Soviet-run Weimar in Germany with “The Magic Mountain” author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller) in 1949.
About as sentimental as any film by the Polish auteur gets — which is to say not at all, despite one long-delayed tear finally shed — it’s another austere, rigorously crafted odyssey through European postwar regret. Stylistically aligned with “Ida” and “Cold War” to perhaps complete a loose trilogy, “Fatherland” opens an intentionally narrow window onto the strained relationship between Mann and Erika after his 16 years of exile in the United States. Pawlikowski’s elliptical style — keen on empty spaces, minimal dialogue, and crisp cutting — has its limits in terms of achieving an emotional payoff, but the actors’ understated turns make for a captivating (and, at 82 minutes, miraculously short) elegy to a lost homeland at the kickoff of the Cold War.
“Fatherland” begins in, of all places, Cannes, a glamorous swath of coastal cityscape that is about as far a cry as you can get from the postwar ruinousness happening in Germany, north of France. That’s where Klaus Mann (August Diehl), Thomas’ homosexual Communist son, would end up taking his own life, but a furtive phone call between twin brother and sister reveals both their closeness as well as the fractures in a broken family dynamic. Erika is living in the Palisades with her father, working as his assistant, when he is summoned back to Germany for the first time since he left his home country in 1933, strongly opposed to Nazi dictatorship. He’s due to receive the Goethe prize, a symbol of lasting German culture amid a country now divided between East and West and scrambling to retain its now-stained identity.
The road trip beginning in Frankfurt and ending in Weimar, where a celebration of Goethe’s 200th birthday is set to take place, becomes the setting for father and daughter to perhaps ease the strains in their relationship. Hüller plays Erika as a kind of doting clerk who has spent more than a decade defending his reputation against accusations of Communism and more (Mann was also, like his son, understood to be homosexual, though this film doesn’t dig into that aspect of the “Death in Venice” author’s life). But there’s also simmering resentment, which starts to quietly boil over once they learn terrible news about Klaus. What about her own life, as more than just somebody’s daughter? (Erika had a rich career as a writer and war correspondent, but that’s for another film.)
“Let’s go home,” Erika says at one point to her father on their journey. “Where is that?,” he says. Indeed, Zischler’s Mann is a lost soul, and these two, to quote Nick Cave, are a bit “like two lost suitcases on a carousel going nowhere.” Fans of Pawlikowski’s style will feel coldly, cozily at home in how their emotionally stingy relationship plays out. There’s also a kind of, to use a crass comparison, “Midnight in Paris” of burned-out revolutionaries and period famous types that rolls out as they brush up against various public figures on their trip. That includes a terse run-in with her bitter Nazi husband Gustaf Gründgens (at this point in time she’s now married to poet W.H. Auden, as the script conspicuously points out) at a fancy cocktail party, and a car ride with German Communist author Johannes R. Becher (Devid Striesow).
Erika also definitely has a sapphic frisson with Associated Press journalist Betty Knox (Anna Madeley), who is in attendance at the press conference that opens the Manns’ Eurotour. Pawlikowski loyalists will also appreciate a cameo from “Cold War” star Joanna Kulig (who in that film was playing a version of the filmmaker’s mother) as a lounge singer.
Shooting Poland for Germany, Pawlikowski’s regular cinematographer Łukasz Żal follows the Manns’ black Buick through a haunted, guilt-ridden Germany from a characteristically chilly remove. That Pawlikowski is telling a story of actual historical figures proves a fascinating challenge for a filmmaker who has previously invented characters to serve as historical reminders.
But that also means that he doesn’t quite psychologically penetrate either of the Manns as immersively as his previous work. Hüller’s performance is typically strong and rooted in cold stares and silences, adding to an already amazing year for the German actress between achieving blockbuster exposure in “Project Hail Mary” and winning the Berlinale best actress prize for her performance in another black-and-white period drama, “Rose.” Stacked against those turns, though, this may not be the role she’ll be best remembered for this year, even as her performance is as masterful and airtight as ever.
What exactly the endgame of this road trip is doesn’t quite crystallize onscreen, leaving gaps and missing bookends that might encourage you to brush up on your European postwar history. To chisel a movie aesthetically within an inch of its life sometimes means the life inside gets lost in the process — though the Manns’ stopover in Soviet-occupied Weimar includes a briefly harrowing reminder of the Russian prisons happening next door to conference rooms and banquet halls in which socialism has begun to install itself. Pawlikowski is always best working in a more personal register, but “Fatherland,” even stripped of historical context, does finally end on a poignant grace note of healing between a father and his daughter.
Grade: B
“Fatherland” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI will release it at a later date.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
