REVIEW

Pawlikowski’s ‘FATHERLAND’ Is a Handsome Snooze

Name: Fatherland review
Item: Fatherland
Rating: 2.7
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · October 30, 2026

Pawlikowski’s ‘FATHERLAND’ Is a Handsome Snooze

Where to watch: In theaters now (updated October 2026)Find showtimes

Following Ida and Cold War, Paweł Pawlikowski delivers the third puzzle piece in his decadently shot, black-and-white history trilogy with Fatherland. The biographical drama follows Erika Mann (Sandra Hüller), daughter of Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), as she accompanies her father on a 1949 tour from American-occupied Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar, where the long-exiled writer is to be showered with awards by both halves of a divided country. A multilingual drama that’s as interested in the philosophy of its characters as it is in the sociology of a Germany trying to shed its Nazi snakeskin, Fatherland is, on paper, an ontological intrigue. In practice, it’s mostly just boring.

As the tour gets underway, the family receives devastating news: Thomas’s son Klaus (August Diehl) has killed himself with sleeping kills. Or at least the news should be devastating, were these characters a little more human in their emotions. Instead they’re cold, buttoned up, burying it all deep down where the polite company can’t see. Erika’s grief leaks out here and there, but Thomas wants to push on with his award-collecting victory lap and let his other son arrange the funeral efforts. The less said about the whole matter, the better. The adoration and respect of the crowd takes precedence over the whims of a narcissistic drug addict (his words). Or so he reasons.

The acting is quietly strong across the board. Hüller continues to prove herself an elite force, carrying the film’s only real flickers of feeling in a performance built almost entirely out of what she’s not allowed to say, the emotions she’s not supposed to show. Zischler’s Mann is appropriately unreadable, a man mostly unaffected, thinking perhaps of his legacy and maybe of how his son’s death has prickled his wife. Pawlikowski has also assembled an impressive cast of extras with stern, old-fashioned faces that look lifted straight out of 1949. It’s convincing, sure, but that’s not enough.

For a movie that mostly stages discussions and speech-giving, there’s something unsurprisingly uncinematic about Pawlikowski’s latest. It’s a lot of an old man rehearsing speeches and then giving said speeches. And then being sung to by large groups of people. Or clapped at. Or seated at long tables with men in uniforms cheersing from coupe glasses. Some of the imagery is genuinely striking and haunting: Klaus’s face hidden amongst a crowd, staring into the souls of the elder Mann in some kind of dream state. These moments speak to the interiority stirring inside these characters, but there just aren’t enough of them.

Ostensibly, the themes are compelling enough on paper. Fatherland is about a man’s delusion that he can help craft a new Germany and cement his own legacy, without realizing that the real-world power players – the Americans and the Russians – will decide Germany’s future for it. The father proceeds as if nothing has happened while the daughter is staggered and wants to reassess the point of it all. It’s about the powerlessness of art in the face of war, and the stubborn insistence that art and literature must fight back anyway if humanity stands any chance. There’s a lesson in here, too, about how when you shape a family’s life around a patriarch’s legacy, they dissipate to nothing, and eventually you have little to point to yourself when the sun finally sets. It asks where home is for a refugee but doesn’t really answer.

Ida was striking and Cold War straight up pummeled me, so Pawlikowski has more than earned the benefit of the doubt with exactly this kind of patience-asking B+W arthouse formula. Fatherland though is mostly just a bore. Stately and methodical (which some will read as boring, and I’m some), it’s the kind of movie that people who avoid foreign films picture when they picture foreign films. Which is a shame. The subject matter is drab and may prove uninteresting for those in the audience who aren’t history buffs, especially since the screenplay does little to build emotional attachment to characters defined by their stoicism as much as anything. Even at just 82 minutes (just over 70 without credits), Fatherland drags. Watching it is not unlike staring at baroque art: I technically understand why it’s interesting, it just doesn’t work for me, and I never want to spend much time in that corner of the exhibit. Everything hums at the same hushed, dignified frequency, and eventually that hum turns into a certifiable lullaby.

CONCLUSION: Handsomely shot and admirably acted, Paweł Pawlikowski’s ‘Fatherland’ is a black-and-white museum piece about as thrilling as a Wikipedia page. Sandra Hüller is blameless, but even at a merciful 82 minutes, this one’s an icy snooze.