Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize-winning writer and voice of the German resistance from abroad, fled Germany in 1933 to take refuge in California, where he lived for sixteen years before returning to Germany in 1949 to receive the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt, show face, and embrace the flattery of his snowballing celebrity. That’s where we enter Polish writer-director (and for the first time, editor) Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, a film that traces Mann’s (Hanns Zischler) widely publicized but brief return to his homeland under the guidance of his brilliant, staid daughter and translator Erika (Sandra Hüller).
We open in Cannes and watch a long conversation unfold between Erika and her brother Klaus (August Diehl) about the approaching tour of their father. Pawlikowski, who was nominated for a Best Directing Oscar for Cold War, makes the captivating decision to keep the camera on Klaus throughout the whole call, only revealing Erika when they say their goodbyes. From there, Klaus is rarely seen again, and Erika and Thomas take center stage, occupying every stunning composition with what seems the weight of the world on their shoulders, thematically transferred from the “life-weary, drug addict” Klaus.
Erika and Thomas start in Frankfurt, West Germany, where the novelist accepts his award and confronts an international press that both praises and grills him. Later they road-trip to the ideologically opposite Weimar in the east, crossing a divided fatherland and leaving an inky black trail of tension, narcissism, and intimate familial pain in their wake.
When asked why he “abandoned” his people during such a difficult time, Thomas sternly remarks that he wouldn’t be alive if he hadn’t. But that doesn’t satisfy his most scathing critics. No matter what you come in knowing or not knowing, any viewer will quickly understand that Mann is an incredibly controversial figure and his return to Germany both maligned and adored. Some find him persona non grata; others line the streets waiting for his arrival like he’s Elvis.
For how accessible Pawlikowski’s previous two features were, Fatherland feels like it’s made by someone else. The trademark black-and-white cinematography (so elegant it almost feels marbled) from regular collaborator Łukasz Żal points to Pawlikowski, as does the tight 82-minute runtime and squarish, 1.37:1 aspect ratio. In a way, Fatherland is also the third in what amounts to a World War II trilogy. But the subject, flow, and approachability combine for the coming of a new Pawlikowski in heady academic form—an auteur in the shape of a wizened professor, much like Mann.
It’s the kind of project that will alienate many viewers by the first Mann press conference in Frankfurt, where it becomes immediately clear that a lack of knowledge surrounding the historical events in question–which range from microscopically inside-baseball to sweepingly applicable to any nationalist bent across the globe–will render a litany of references and conversations impenetrable for anyone without a PhD on the subject.
The screenplay (co-written by Henk Handloegten) deals heavily with prominent philosophers like Kant and Nietzsche, references a love for Wagner as an alignment with Hitler, and dives headfirst into the controversy of Mann’s presence in Germany that consumes the split country in the immediate aftermath of the war. Here, something as simple as a boys’ choir singing a nationalist anthem has such a strong undercurrent of historical context that it deserves serious investigation to pick up on why we’re seeing it, whereas in Cold War, the undercurrent in the choir is there, but understanding the unwieldy history beneath the frame is much less integral to following the devastating love story at the film’s core.
That said, Pawlikowski is a master of making the viewer feel (at times, even mysteriously understand) what emotion or psychology lies beneath the surface of the image, and the complex, contentious feeling of Fatherland is contagious more often than not. Who can’t relate to being frustrated with a parent? Or, at the very least, an infinitely complex relation to a parent that reflects love, resentment, and a lifetime spent together? That contagious feeling hurts because everyone in Fatherland is hurting.
One might not be fully clued in on the historical or philosophical reference being discussed at every turn, but they can feel Erika’s admiration and disdain for her father, Klaus’s existential aimlessness in the wake of the Third Reich’s reign, and Thomas’s grating obsession with himself. It’s the kind of film you ache through. But the aching doesn’t come from devastating romance or impossible love, as it did in Cold War, but the inherent difficulty in ever fully grasping one’s identity or coming to terms with the inevitable conflict of family.
Regular collaborator Joanna Kulig has a delightful cameo as a jazz singer. She also probably would’ve knocked the Erika part out of the park, but it’s hard to imagine anyone playing the incredibly subtle, emotionally tangled, and sophisticated part of Erika better than Sanda Hüller, the German-born actress who’s been on an absolute roll since 2023, when she co-led two modern greats in The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall and attracted the attention of non-cinephilic audiences with an Oscar nomination for the latter that landed her in her first American blockbuster (Project Hail Mary). In the international cinema scene, that streak started a decade ago with Toni Erdmann, another film about a daughter who must tolerate a tone-deaf father, this one much funnier than Thomas Mann.
For how quickly it passes, the dense, cleverly titled Fatherland––a nod to the nationalist German “Vaterland” and cheeky framing of the father-daughter story it tells––is about so much: heimat/belonging, the disappearance of meaning (“Do you believe in anything anymore? Maybe we should all just kill ourselves.”), collective and individual guilt, inherited pain, “a spiritual and moral future,” and the sometimes impossible task of clearing one’s conscience politically, societally, and/or personally. While it doesn’t clear the bar of his last two (it’s hard to be better than perfect), Fatherland is Pawlikowski in immaculate form. Successive watches will no doubt reveal greater and greater depths to behold, the film all but guaranteed to age like a fine wine.
Fatherland premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.