Directed by: Paweł Pawlikowski
Starring: Hanns Zischler, Sandra Hüller, August Diehl, Joanna Kulig
Rating: ★★★★☆
Pawel Pawlikowski’s black-and-white cinema carries a distinctive weight. The absence of color gives his images a sense of solidity while enhancing their grace, without tipping into monumentality. Unlike Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which could have been shot in color, Pawlikowski’s films, from Ida (2013) to Cold War (2018) and now Fatherland, are inseparable from the stark, refined cinematography of Łukasz Żal.
The shadow of World War II never lifts. It lingers as landscape and moral condition, a world permanently marked by ruin. Joanna Kulig returns once more as a singer, a familiar presence that hints at continuity, but calling these films a trilogy would be misleading. Chronologically, Fatherland sits closest to the war, and it shows. Co-written with Hendrik Handloegten, the film follows Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) as he returns from exile to a divided Germany in 1949.
The setup is deceptively simple. Mann (Hanns Zischler) tours a country split between East and West, accepting honors while confronting its fractured identity. At his side is his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), who drives, translates, mediates. Their journey moves from Frankfurt to Weimar, across a border that still feels negotiable but already carries the weight of history. News of the death of Thomas’ son and poète maudit, Klaus (August Diehl) arrives mid-journey, quietly shifting the film’s emotional ground.
Much of Fatherland unfolds inside Erika’s car. Pawlikowski turns the vehicle into a moving vantage point, sidestepping the grandiose simplicity often associated with neorealist cinema. The result is a portrait of a country suspended between collapse and reconstruction, before the Berlin Wall hardens division into permanence. In this sense, the film operates as a prelude to Cold War, where that division becomes an almost insurmountable barrier for the lost lover, Zula and Wikt.
Pawlikowski keeps one foot firmly in reality. The dream element barely registers. A fleeting image of Thomas imagining Klaus’s funeral flickers on screen—the deceased himself bizarrely appears among the mourners before the image vanishes. The film remains anchored in the material world, where ideas are tested against circumstance.
Mann invokes Goethe and the ideal of art as a universal language, but Pawlikowski pushes back. Culture does not transcend history so easily and cannot be appreciated in a ruined world. Fatherland confirms Pawlikowski as a filmmaker of rare austerity and earned him, once again after Cold War, Best Director at Cannes.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on May 9, 2026