Fatherland

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

FATHERLAND   ***

Paweł Pawlikowski

2026

IDEA:  After over a decade in exile, Thomas Mann returns to Germany in 1949 to receive the Goethe Prize, controversially in both sides of the country.

BLURB:  Fatherland is a palm-sized miniature carved from a mighty block of marble, compact and pin-sharp. In his loose historical trilogy, of which this is the putative final chapter, Pawlikowski has honed a style of methodical subtraction, distilling the chaotic, fractured landscape of postwar Europe into austere close-up vignettes. Fatherland provides just a sliver of the life of famed author Thomas Mann, using his real-life return to Germany in 1949 to reflect a nation, a continent, and a world divided, seemingly irreconcilably. Depending on the location — West Germany, the Soviet occupation zone, the US — Mann is received as a progressive intellectual or an exemplar of the German nationalist character, a Communist traitor or a Marxist hero. In the wake of a war that confounds identity and redraws state and ideological lines, what happens to the culture, and the artists, of the past? Where do they belong, and to whom? These questions echo through the liminal spaces of a country torn between old and new, in hotel rooms and churches and on rubble-lined streets rendered in Łukasz Żal’s stark, geometrically precise black-and-white cinematography. They flash across the faces of Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller, terrifically controlled actors who make even slight disruptions to their miens feel shattering. And they’re present in Pawlikowski’s soundtrack contrasts, from Bach to Becher, making music an object of cultural distinction as well as a source of transcendent feeling beyond borders. Fatherland is so short that it doesn’t ruminate on these ideas so much as briefly cast raking light on them. It might seem too slight if that bone-dry brevity weren’t also what gives such palpable fragility to the historical moment it depicts.