Critic Reviews

Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.

It is immaculately performed by Zischler and especially Hüller, grounding the film throughout with an uncanny, expressive stillness.

At just 80 minutes it’s small but perfectly formed and packed with more ideas and infused with more heartbreak than most overlong arthouse epics.

Fatherland is an elegant, engrossing film; chilly at times, but also poignant as repressed feelings finally bubble to the surface. This is another expansive, enriching work from a modern master.

Alongside its verbal and intellectual content, Fatherland is immersively evocative, genuinely making us feel as if we are visiting the two Germanies in 1949.

Minor quibbles aside, Pawlikowski has delivered a gorgeous poem of a film, a mournful meditation on national identity, private and public tragedy, the dangers of trying to remain apolitical in deeply political times, and the enduring cultural riches that can offer small but crucial solace in apocalyptic times.

Shot in chiselled light by Lukasz Zal, who was behind the camera for the first two films in the trilogy, Fatherland also becomes, as the car moves eastwards, increasingly taken up with the ravages of grief and the responsibility of the artist. Those themes come together in a beautiful, sad epiphany that closes out a terse film with divine economy.

There’s a haunted, ravaged beauty to the film, particularly in the homestretch.

Reuniting with a majority of his “Ida” and “Cold War” collaborators, a 1:37 aspect ratio, and cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s masterful black and white compositions, Pawlikowski, whether intentional or not, has crafted a trilogy of films that chronicle the painful reverberations of the Second World War. With “Fatherland,” he’s also holding up a mirror. A reflection on today and, more likely, the near future. How will you treat those complicit in war crimes and humanitarian horrors? How will you grieve a world that is gone? Or will you grieve at all?

It’s the kind of film you ache through. But the aching doesn’t come from devastating romance or impossible love, as it did in Cold War, but the inherent difficulty in ever fully grasping one’s identity or coming to terms with the inevitable conflict of family.