Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JOSEPH MENGELE [Cannes Film Festival 2025 - Cannes, France]
The tricky element of highglighting a villain is the danger to make him empathetic. This can be a tricky thing especially when it is a reviled Nazi criminal in Joseph Mengele. "The Disappearance Of Joseph Mengele" [Cannes Premiere] is a tricky balance both for its director and its actor. August Diehl plays Mengele with a gruffness and a fanaticism but also with a paranoia and a disgust that is not remorse but is something more troubling. Highlighting such a criminal in any way is tricky on film as a mass media outlay. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov takes a hunted approach while still understanding that his subject is a rat in a cage which is the ultimate irony for the terrors he inflicted. Placing his son in the mix to come after him in the early 1960s IS definitely an interesting choice but allows to expose the man in the decrepit setting that became his life but also the blindness and polarity of his ideas.
Serebrennikov doesn't judge but he doesn't utterly villify either. Diehl understands just the right balance of ego, nationalism and blind faith. Of course when he speaks then it feels empty though to him it is his idiom. What is the most interesting ultimately is the breakdown of the man in the late 1970s when he is too old to resist in many ways. He is a skeleton of himself, haunted by demons he created but will not let go. The film is completely shot in black and white except for stark technicolor widescreen in the time before the war. The movie does take the viewer into Auschwitz through the lens of a 16mm camera showing some of the horrors and the non chalance through which the Russian soldiers and officers went about their business. Serebrennikov understands he is playing with fire in a certain way and tries to approach it in a certain way. At only one point does it seem to go over the line but that is also based in the brutality of the human condition it is showing.
Mengele is a creatin but he is a product of his own progression and his family which was indocrinated into the German Nationalism that purported all that followed. Watching his father scold him and force him into a marrage after the actions he committed is almost like a Faustian play. The ultimate payback that he sees in the film is of course metaphorical because his actual bones were only identified in 1992. Serebrennikov also front ends the film with an interesting proologue that never comes back though its intention is quite specific. "The Disappearance Of Joseph Mengele" shows the degregation of the man, as it rightfull should, but it does also show the dogma and paranoia put upon him as he continued to try to at least live in whatever palid settings he eventually found himself. B-
By Tim Wassberg