★★★★☆
Paweł Pawlikowski’s compressed, exact account of Thomas Mann’s return to Germany in 1949 is named for the father but belongs to the daughter, and to Sandra Hüller.
Pawlikowski opens with Klaus Mann (August Diehl) on the telephone to his sister, frayed and despairing, and the call hangs over everything that follows. Erika (Hüller) is accompanying their father, Thomas (Hanns Zischler), on his first visit to Germany since his exile: a prize in Frankfurt, then an invitation across the new border into the Soviet zone, each side keen to claim the country’s most famous living writer for itself.
Pawlikowski and his co-writer Henk Handloegten have made one significant change to history, putting Erika in the car where Mann’s wife Katia sat in life, and it is the making of the film. Hüller is magnificent. Her Erika is her father’s fixer, minder and conscience, quick-witted and wholly unsentimental, and Hüller lets you see what each of those roles costs her. Zischler’s Mann gives away almost nothing in public and very little more in private, which leaves the film to her. She takes it, and runs with it.
Łukasz Żal shoots the rubble of Frankfurt and the ceremonies of both Germanys in black and white, in compositions with the stillness of engravings. The film is talkative by Pawlikowski’s standards, full of speeches, receptions and press conferences at which Mann is asked to speak for a nation he left. It is at its best between them, in the back of the car, where father and daughter say what the public occasions will not allow, and in the silences with which she greats his self-serving accommodations with the East German autocrats.
For all that, it is a moment between Erika Mann and her ex-husband that stuck with me the most. He archly complains that her father’s Mephisto is clearly based on him; now that the Nazis have been defeated, he’s eager to reclaim his narrative, and fast. He needles away, full of pride and superiority despite everything. Eventually he crosses a line, and receives one of the most thoroughly deserved slaps in cinema.
The Cannes jury gave Pawlikowski the Best Director prize. Fully deserved.
Fatherland played at the London Film Festival and was released in UK cinemas by MUBI on 23 October 2026.