‘The Disappearance Of Josef Mengele’ review: Kirill Serebrennikov’s drama tracks post-War life of the SS ‘Angel of Death’

Dir. Kirill Serebrennikov. France/Germany 2025. 136mins

Josef Mengele was the physician and SS officer whose horrific experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz earned him the sobriquet ‘Angel of Death’. A fictionalised account of his career could easily lead a film-maker into sensationalism, but it’s a trap that Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov avoids – up to a point.

Revolves around an imposing lead by a largely unrecognisable August Diehl

Based on the novel by Olivier Guez and debuting as a Cannes Premiere, The Disappearance Of Josef Mengele displays the brio and ambition characteristic of Serebrennikov, although the film is in a markedly different mode from previous stylised exercises; notably Leto, Tchaikovsky’s Wife and last year’s freewheeling biopic Limonov. Disappearance revolves around an imposing lead – sometimes subtle, sometimes a touch barnstorming – by a largely unrecognisable August Diehl. While the film is a touch unwieldy at two hours plus, its stylishly executed espionage thriller mode should make this the most commercially appealing film yet from the auteur filmmaker.

Shot almost entirely in black-and-white Scope, the film concentrates largely on Mengele’s post-war existence in South America. On-screen captions divide the story into three chapters, built around different pseudonyms of the fugitive Nazi – but as the narrative zigzags between eras and locations, it doesn’t break down quite so neatly. The film can also be seen as showing events from two contrasting perspectives: that of Mengele and his adult son Rolf (Max Brettschneider), who comes to visit his elderly father in Brazil to demand the truth about his crimes.

Mengele’s own travels include his surreptitious post-war visit to his family home in Germany, where, together with his father (Burghart Klaussner) and other Nazi loyalists, he discusses the long-term project of the Third Reich – something they regard as having only been inconveniently interrupted. In Argentina, Nazis flourish under the regime of the Perons, as seen at a sumptuous country house where Mengele is celebrating his marriage to his former sister-in-law Martha (Frederike Becht).

Later, he is increasingly an outsider, arrested and questioned for illicit medical practices in South America, and eventually hunted as a war criminal. The extended penultimate section shows him living on a farm in Brazil with a Hungarian couple, Gitta (Annamaria Lang) and Geza Stammer (Thelio Werner), and proving the worst house guest imaginable: ranting at the table, sleeping with Gitta, cursing the paprika-heavy diet.

By and large, The Disappearance… builds up a restrained portrayal of a Nazi sociopath convinced that a briefly triumphant ideology makes him altogether normal, indeed virtuous. The film does, however, fall into the clichéd cinema position of assuming that Nazis only ever want to talk about Nazism, leaving Mengele and his associates coming across as a gang of grandiloquent bores.

Serebrennikov also makes the mistake of encouraging Diehl – especially as Mengele gets older and testier – to go full blast with the kind of Hitlerian raging that it is now hard to dissociate from Bruno Ganz’s immortal performance in Downfall. It’s also notable that the women in Mengele’s life, including his first wife Irene (Dana Herfurth), barely emerge as fully-fleshed characters – the exception being Gitta, sharply depicted by Lang as cynical and loftily resentful.

The most serious lapse, however, is an extended flashback in vivid colour, partly in pastiche home-movie style, to Mengele’s activities in Auschwitz. This must count as one of cinema’s most disturbingly graphic depictions of concentration camp atrocities. The motive is clearly to unveil the horrific reality of what Mengele depicts as research for the benefit of a healthy society (a healthy all-Aryan society, that is). Nevertheless, the borderline-kitsch horror-movie excess of these sequences feel excessive and intrusive, once again raising the recurrent question of what it is ethically appropriate to show in fictional depictions of the Holocaust.

Overall, this is a fascinating work, if not entirely successful – although Vladyslav Opelyants’s cinematography is an outright tour de force with its sinuous extended takes. Ilya Demutsky’s score, heavy on dissonant strings and horns, tensely evokes the mindstate of a protagonist on a long, spiralling path to collapse.

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