Review: ‘Fatherland’ explores the wreckage of a broken culture

From the start, I knew I wouldn’t know what to think of Fatherland until its final moments, and I was right. Pawlikowski’s 2013 Ida, about a 1960s nun raised in a convent who learns the horrifying truth about her parents, is a movie I’ve raved about for years and that sticks with me. While Fatherland isn’t as immediately gripping, it has its own emotional devastation. 

Sandra Hüller (Project Hail Mary, Digger) stars as Erika Mann, the real-life daughter of acclaimed author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler, Munich), who is taking her father back to Germany in 1949 for the first time since they fled the Nazis, where he’s being awarded a prize in both West and East Germany. Fatherland wrestles with what defines a culture’s identity and if a homeland can ever be whole again after it’s been broken and taken away. 

Pawlikowski reteams with his longtime cinematographer Łukasz Żal (who also shot The Zone of Interest), and the film’s grayscale black-and-white photography and precise compositions are its biggest strength, doing the emotional labor of characters who can’t yet express their experience. A final scene set in a crumbling cathedral, as an organist plays Mozart from the organ’s out-of-tune pipes, still haunts me.