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.

Production companies: CG Cinema, Hype Studios International sales: Kinology gmelin@kinology.eu Producers: Charles Gillibert, Ilya Stewart, Kirill Serebrennikov, Julio Chavezmontes, Felix von Boehm, Yan Vizinberg, Abigail Honor, Chris Cooper, Mélanie Biessy Screenplay: Kirill Serebrennikov Based on the novel by Olivier Guez Cinematography: Vladyslav Opelyants Production design: Vladyslav Ogay Editor: Hansjörg Weissbrich Music: Ilya Demutsky Main cast: August Diehl, Max Brettschneider, Dana Herfurth, Frederike Becht

’

Certainly, for those curious to know how the notorious Auschwitz doctor, aka the “Angel of Death,” eked out the final decades of his life in various South American countries, changing homes and identities, farming, scheming and, yes, getting the occasional handjob, the film answers that question many times over. But for those who aren’t Third Reich completists, nor have any interest in historical fantasy that does little beyond embellishing Mengele’s ignoble reputation, this intellectually vacuous exercise can be tough to stomach — despite how well put together the whole thing is.

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele The Bottom Line The Bad Doctor. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere)

Cast: August Diehl, Max Bretschneider, Dana Herfurth, Friederike Becht, Mirco Kreibich, David Ruland, Annamaria Lang, Tilo Werner

Director, screenwriter: Kirill Serebrennikov, based on the book by Olivier Guez

2 hours 15 minutes

The Russian-born Serebrennikov is a talented auteur with plenty of style to boot, showcasing his directorial chops in six eclectic features made since 2016. He jumps easily between genres, from a scruffy rock ‘n’ roll flick (Leto) to a post-Soviet mindfuck (Petrov’s Flu), from a brooding period piece (Tchaikovsky’s Wife) to a continent-hopping tale of a political mystery man (Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie).

Related Video

A feted cinematic chameleon who was controversially put on trial in Russia, Serebrennikov can be hard to pin down. It’s perhaps the latter quality that attracted him to French writer Olivier Guez’s 2017 fictional biography imagining Mengele’s life after World War II, when he was constantly evading arrest by local authorities or possible kidnapping by Mossad. Like its unwholesome protagonist, the film — and the roving camera of Vladislav Opelyants, shooting in gorgeously high-contrast black-and-white — is forever on the move, creating an immersive aesthetic experience that amounts to a big pile of nothing.

To his credit, Serebrennikov never attempts to turn Mengele, played by August Diehl (A Hidden Life) in a committed performance that borders at times on caricature, into a likeable protagonist. There are no save-the-cat redemptions for a man who became famous for torturing, murdering and performing hideous experiments on countless Jews as part of a team of doctors overseeing medical services at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We never have an ounce of sympathy for the loathsome fugitive, whether he’s trying — though barely — to reconcile with his son, Rolf (Max Bretschneider), who pays him a visit in Sao Paulo in 1977, hoping to finally get to know his long-lost dad. Nor do we shed a tear when he’s forced to flee the farm where he’s being protected — though barely — by a Hungarian couple (Annamaria Lang, Tilo Werner) who openly despise him. And we certainly don’t get upset when, during his dying days, Mengele is unable to get it up while his Brazilian housekeeper offers him a massage with a happy ending.

Watching The Disappearance of Josef Mengele leaves one without any real feeling beyond indifference or deep disgust. The one sequence capable of provoking some other kind of emotion is also the film’s most problematic: Midway through the narrative, the screen suddenly shifts to color and we flash back to Auschwitz to watch some of the doctor’s dirty deeds. Set to lush classical music serving as a counterpoint for all the atrocities we’re witnessing, it’s a moment of pure Holocaust-ploitation, pulling on our heartstrings while offering up snippets of unspeakable evil and squeamish gore. Unlike Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which kept such scenes forever out of the frame, Serebrennikov’s decision to show us Mengele at his absolute worst feels both morally suspect and cinematically vulgar. At best, it makes us hate the Nazi even more.

Slightly more successful are the postwar thriller aspects of the story, which shift between time periods (from the mid-1950s to the late-1970s, with a prologue set in 2023) and countries (Germany, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil) as Mengele keeps outsmarting those trying to bring him to justice, aided and abetted by a network of exiled Hitler sympathizers. He was also supported by his wealthy German family, who are as unapologetic as he is about what happened during the war and refuse to acknowledge his crimes.

“You did your duty, you didn’t do anything wrong,” they keep reminding him. It’s a motto Mengele lives by till the bitter end, dying the kind of natural death that his countless victims were never afforded. And he seems to have lived quite well for the most part, marrying his second wife (Friederike Becht) in a beautiful private ceremony captured by the director in a single take, the camera honing in at one point on a wedding cake capped by a cute little Nazi flag. Or else frolicking with his first wife (Dana Herfurth) along the Rhine, then having rough sex with her until he violently orgasms and nearly breaks the bed they’re doing it on. Good for the doctor, bad for us.

If there’s perhaps anything Serebrennikov is trying to say in this noirish Nazi fantasy, it’s that men like Mengele ultimately managed to escape retribution through the help of other people, who were either seduced by his commanding virility or remained loyal to the Third Reich long after the war ended. At a time when fascism is on the rise throughout the world, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele maintains that evil persists because some of us let it happen. It’s the only possible takeaway from a movie that gives little justification for immortalizing such a vile life on screen.

Serebrennikov’s new film “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele” (Disappearance, 2025) is based on the novel by Olivier Geze about the most famous Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on Auschwitz prisoners. The main role in the film was played by August Diehl, who embodied the image of Woland in Mikhail Lokshin’s film “The Master and Margarita”.

The painting “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele” was presented as part of the Cannes Premiere program. This is the third film by the Russian director, which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival.

As reported by EADaily, on May 17, Serebrennikov was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor — the highest state award of France. The badge of honor was presented to him personally by the Minister of Culture of France Rashida Dati.