Fatherland IS WOKE

Comments and reviews

• 

  NWS staff review.

  Oct 29, 2026

  6/10

  I'll be honest, I picked this one because it was short. Eighty-two minutes. After a week of three-hour movies that think they're the Bible, a black-and-white European film that promised to be done before my coffee got cold sounded like a gift. And for most of it, it is. It's also one of the coldest movies I've sat through this year, and I mean that as half a compliment. The setup: it's 1949, and Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize guy who wrote Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, goes back to Germany for the first time since he ran from Hitler. He's getting the Goethe Prize, and he wants to give speeches on both sides of the new line, American-run Frankfurt and Soviet-run Weimar. His daughter Erika drives him around in a big black Buick and plays translator, bodyguard and press secretary all at once. Sandra Hüller plays Erika. Hanns Zischler plays the old man. Paweł Pawlikowski directed it, the same guy who did Ida and Cold War, and MUBI put it out. Hüller is the reason to watch. Full stop. She plays Erika like a woman holding a lit match in a room full of gasoline, polite and clipped and smiling at reporters, and you can see her doing the math on every person who walks up. There's a scene at a fancy hotel bar in Frankfurt where she runs into her ex-husband, an actor who did just fine under the Nazis, and she slaps him right there in front of everybody. I actually said "good" out loud. My dog looked up. Zischler is good too, in a stiffer way. His Mann is proud, a little vain, and very sure the world needs to hear what he thinks about Goethe. You believe this man won a Nobel Prize and you also believe he was hard to have as a dad. The middle of the movie is where it earns its keep. Word comes that Erika's twin brother Klaus has killed himself back in Cannes. She wants to go to the funeral. Her father wants to keep going with the tour. Then they drive into the Soviet zone in near total silence, and the Communists roll out the banquets and the children's choirs and all this talk about a brand-new German utopia. A stranger tries to tell Mann that people are being locked up at the old Buchenwald camp, and he gets hustled away mid-sentence. That little moment gave me more chills than most horror movies. You can see a new kind of tyranny putting on its Sunday clothes while the old one is still smoking in the ruins. If you like history, that stretch is really sharp. Every frame looks like a museum photograph. The rubble, the hotel lobbies, the empty roads. It's gorgeous. It's also so careful and so tidy that I kept wanting somebody to knock a glass over. People mostly talk in calm, smart sentences about big ideas, and after a while it feels more like a seminar than a story. When Erika finally blows up at her father and lets years of grief and resentment out, it's the best scene in the movie, and I wished there were three more like it. Because the movie is so short, a lot of the family history just gets hinted at. Why is Klaus so far gone? Why is Erika this angry? You get pieces. You don't get the whole thing. Now for the part this site cares about. It got the woke stamp, but only on The Gay Ratio, and barely. Klaus Mann is presented as openly gay, and the movie makes a point of it. Early on there's a shot of him sitting naked near a bed while his sleeping male lover wakes up in the background. It's not long, and it's not graphic in a sex-scene way, but it's right at the front of the film, so it sets a tone you didn't ask for. And at the end, the on-screen wrap-up lists "homophobia" among the things this family was up against. That's it. No speeches, no lectures, nothing else in the story leans that way. To be fair, the real Klaus Mann was gay, so it isn't made up out of thin air. But the movie chose to open on it, and it chose to name it in the closing text, and that framing is what landed it here. If that opening is a dealbreaker in your house, now you know. It's a "skip the first few minutes" situation, not a whole-movie problem. What I didn't expect was the ending. They stop at a bombed-out church on the way home, an organ plays Bach, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," and for a minute the father and daughter just sit there. After all that ice, it's genuinely moving. Put it next to the Buchenwald moment and you can tell the movie knows what it means for a country to lose God and try to replace Him with a party or a philosophy. So, 6 out of 10. Great acting, beautiful to look at, and smart about history, but a bit too chilly and too short to really hit home, with that one choice up front that will put some people off. Watch it for Hüller, and keep the remote close for the opening.