The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, review: ‘long and necessarily sombre’

A sprawling postwar investigation into the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele is exactly what it should be: a troubling portrait of evil.

The film proper begins in 1956 in Buenos Aires, when the Nazi, then the world’s most wanted war criminal, is hiding out under the name of Greggor. His life is already in the shadows, the man left to stew on the failures of the Third Reich, as he watches others denounce fellow Germans to save their own necks.

 “You did your duty…you did nothing wrong,” he is told, while others around him refute the truths of the Shoah about the Holocaust, among the lies that only 65,000 people were murdered.

This portrait, largely filmed in black-and-white, cuts very deep. Played by German actor August Diehl, who has accumulated an impressive career working with the likes of Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) and Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life) the actor gives a startling performance as Mengele, especially in the film’s later scenes where he is confronted by his son, who asks him frankly: “What did you do at Auschwitz?”

The Angel of Death: August Diehl as Josef Mengele[Missing Credit]August Diehl as Mengele[Missing Credit]

Nothing of which he is ashamed. A desperate and pathetic figure who is riddled with physical ailments, Mengele calls Auschwitz “a work camp” and appears unable to understand why Israel is hunting him down. “Why are they after me?” he spits. “I was a doctor. I saved people.” There were 20 doctors in Auschwitz, he rages. “Villains, criminals, all of them.”

Premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film is directed by Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, who was at the festival just a year ago with Limonov: The Ballad, his lively depiction of dissident and politician Eduard Limonov starring Ben Whishaw. If that was an uproarious, unfettered work, this is necessarily sombre, and will surely be triggering for some to watch.

Yet there’s no argument that it is also an important and impressive one that lingers in the memory. Running at almost three hours, it is also a long movie, that travels from Argentina to Germany and, finally, Brazil, as Mengele hides under the names Peter and Pedro, an ignominious end to this formerly high-ranking Nazi. There is a school of thought that he lived out his days in his own personal hell and this film subscribes to it. Every war ends at a different time for different people, he remarks. “It seems mine has yet to end.”

The Disappearance of Josef Mengele screened at the Cannes Film Festival

 ★★★★