Paweł Pawlikowski's 'Fatherland': A Dense, Aching Return to Divided Germany

Paweł Pawlikowski's "Fatherland," an 82-minute black-and-white drama about Thomas Mann's 1949 return to a divided Germany, opens in theaters on October 23 after premiering at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. The Film Stage's review names it a Critic's Pick and calls it "Pawlikowski in immaculate form."

The film follows Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), who fled Germany in 1933 and spent sixteen years in California before returning in 1949 to accept the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt. He travels under the guidance of his daughter and translator Erika, played by Sandra Hüller, with August Diehl appearing as her brother Klaus in an early phone conversation that opens the film in Cannes.

Pawlikowski, nominated for a Best Directing Oscar for "Cold War," makes a striking formal choice right away. The camera stays on Klaus for the entire call, and Erika only appears when they say their goodbyes. After that, Klaus is rarely seen again, and Erika and Thomas take center stage, carrying what the review describes as "the weight of the world on their shoulders."

What is the film actually about?

Father and daughter start in Frankfurt, West Germany, where Mann accepts his award and faces an international press corps that both praises and grills him. They then road-trip east to ideologically opposed Weimar, crossing a divided fatherland and leaving, in the reviewer's phrase, "an inky black trail of tension, narcissism, and intimate familial pain in their wake."

Mann's return is both maligned and adored. Asked why he "abandoned" his people, Thomas answers sternly that he wouldn't be alive if he hadn't. Some Germans treat him as persona non grata; others line the streets waiting for his arrival "like he's Elvis."

The screenplay, co-written by Henk Handloegten, deals heavily with Kant and Nietzsche, treats a love of Wagner as an alignment with Hitler, and engages the controversy that consumed the split country immediately after the war. The review warns that the film "will alienate many viewers by the first Mann press conference in Frankfurt," because a lack of historical knowledge — which ranges from microscopically inside-baseball to sweepingly applicable to any nationalist bent — renders many references impenetrable "for anyone without a PhD on the subject."

How does it compare to 'Cold War' and 'Ida'?

For how accessible Pawlikowski's previous two features were, "Fatherland" feels like a break — the review calls it "the coming of a new Pawlikowski in heady academic form," an auteur "in the shape of a wizened professor, much like Mann." The trademark cinematography from regular collaborator Łukasz Żal ("so elegant it almost feels marbled"), the tight runtime and the squarish 1.37:1 aspect ratio all point back to the earlier work, and the film effectively completes a World War II trilogy.

The difference is structural. In "Cold War," the history beneath a boys' choir scene was less integral to following the love story. Here, a choir singing a nationalist anthem carries a historical undercurrent that "deserves serious investigation to pick up on why we're seeing it."

Still, Pawlikowski remains, per the review, "a master of making the viewer feel (at times, even mysteriously understand) what emotion or psychology lies beneath the surface of the image." Viewers may miss every philosophical reference but can still feel Erika's admiration and disdain, Klaus's existential aimlessness after the Third Reich, and Thomas's "grating obsession with himself." The ache comes not from impossible love but from the difficulty of grasping one's identity and the inevitable conflict of family.

Hüller, on a streak since co-leading "The Zone of Interest" and "Anatomy of a Fall" in 2023 — the latter earning her an Oscar nomination and a role in the American blockbuster "Project Hail Mary" — delivers a performance the review finds hard to imagine anyone playing better. Regular collaborator Joanna Kulig has a delightful cameo as a jazz singer.

The review's verdict: "Fatherland" doesn't clear the bar of Pawlikowski's last two films — "it's hard to be better than perfect" — but predicts successive watches will reveal greater depths, with the film "all but guaranteed to age like a fine wine."