With his 2025 film “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,” Kirill Serebrennikov delivers to the world of cinema not merely a biography, but a moral nightmare. Rather than focusing on the atrocities committed by the man known as the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, the film centers on the decades-long process of impunity that followed those horrors. Serebrennikov deliberately avoids turning the terror into a visual spectacle—as so many conventional Holocaust films do—instead imprisoning the viewer in the claustrophobic, silent, and corrosive atmosphere in which evil survives by erasing its own traces.
From an academic perspective, the film stands as one of the most mature examples of post-atrocity narratives. Serebrennikov’s direction locates violence in inaction and waiting. The escape story, unfolding across the landscapes of Paraguay and Brazil in South America, is not really about movement; it is a tale of ontological void. By rejecting the healing power of time, the director turns time itself into an accomplice. Here, crimes are not forgiven as the years pass—they simply become habit, routine, and eventually a profound forgetting. Serebrennikov’s minimalism and the rhythm built on repetition in the scenes meticulously construct the suffocating moral sensation of justice that never arrives.
From the viewer’s perspective, the film’s heaviest burden falls on August Diehl. Diehl portrays Mengele not as a cartoonish monster, but as a hollowed-out fugitive—perpetually on edge, gradually ordinary, aging in silence. His performance proves how terrifying evil can be when it does not scream, but simply lives quietly in a room. For the audience, the experience is less a cinematic pleasure than an exercise in unease. The film promises neither catharsis nor a final sense of justice. Instead, by allowing Mengele to die quietly on a beach, it leaves the viewer alone with the truth that history does not always correct itself.
In the global uncertainty and resurgent ideological extremism of 2026, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele serves as a warning that concerns not only the past but the present. At a time when accountability gaps and historical amnesia are widening, the film reminds us that forgetting is also an active “act”—and sometimes a crime. By transforming a historical drama into a space of confrontation, Serebrennikov underscores that every second justice is delayed is itself a continuation of violence.
