Overview
- Adapted from Olivier Guez’s Renaudot-winning book, the film reconstructs Josef Mengele’s postwar flight and disappearance in South America.
- Premiered in the Cannes Première section in May before its theatrical rollout in France.
- German actor August Diehl plays Mengele in a performance highlighted by reviewers for its intensity.
- Shot largely in stark black and white, the film includes a brief color passage depicting Auschwitz atrocities that Serebrennikov calls a deliberate “therapy of shock.”
- The story includes a fraught father–son encounter and engages with the banality of evil and the fact that Mengele died in Brazil in 1979 without facing trial.