Fatherland: Thomas Mann takes a postwar roadtrip in Paweł Pawlikowski brisk and beautiful father-daughter drama

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest black-and-white revisitation of the postwar landscape is a dangerous film to have in a festival because it’s such a model of economy, almost casually demonstrating intelligence and cinematic beauty in half the runtime of other pedigreed auteur efforts. Set in 1949, its sharply acted story of Thomas Mann and his travel companion, daughter Erika Mann, moves as confidently and swiftly through West and East Germany as their medallioned Mercedes, portraying the compromises and hypocrisies baked into the new political and social frameworks that are ostensibly burying the fascist past. 

This is not just a bleary-eyed journalist speaking: the concision expresses a moral seriousness and avoids obscuring certain truths through elaboration. The Manns’ speeches-and-awards trip to Allied West Germany and Soviet-occupied East Germany neatly expresses the challenges that even the most edifying understandings of humanity underwent after the hellish massacre of World War II.  

Pawlikowski, co-writing with Henk Handloegten, makes a tragedy of exile that’s ultimately not about one ageing author or his family, but about all of us, living in a world we no longer recognise (then or, given our current times, now). 

Thomas Mann’s first trip is to Frankfurt, Goethe’s birthplace, to accept an award in a flurry of diplomatic ceremony, but Pawlikowski opens with an overture in dissolute gloom: Klaus Mann – Mephisto author, son to Thomas, and Erika’s close confidant – in some hotel suite, kidding-not-kidding murmuring into the transatlantic phone line to Erika that they should all off themselves like other writers. His absence will loom over the trip to come, as Thomas’s monumental rhetoric envisions a possible postwar order that, while charming the literary senses, sounds a bit mustily rooted in 19th-century ideals. Erika’s wrangling of logistics comes to represent an attention to the here and now, which sees her dealing with optimistic forward-looking German hosts but also postwar operators at parties and receptions like her ex-husband Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), an actor under the Nazi regime who maintains “they came to me.” 

As enervating as the proceedings can be, Erika’s role as a translator and essentially tour manager originates in her evident love for her father. Though Fatherland does not push her own accomplishments, she boasts an illustrious antiwar career in journalism and theatre – alluded to through a chummy Associated Press newsie – and in fact Pawlikowski and Handloegten’s account (though drawing on Mann’s speeches) rests on an imaginative revision that’s audacious but so roundly imagined it goes unnoticed: Thomas Mann in fact took this equivalent trip with his wife, Katie, not Erika. (Likewise the film shoots Poland for the halls and hotels of postwar Germany.) 

What makes the father-and-daughter generational double-act so effective of course rests on the casting: Sandra Hüller (herself born in East Germany) brings her clipped brilliance to the role, always able to slide in lines and glances that allow us to breathe the air of these places right alongside her. Thanks to the cast she leads, this isn’t one of those 21st-century prestige “famous encounter” films that springboard from some on-paper-tantalising meeting. As the (Thomas) Mann himself, Hanns Zischler, keeps cards close with this self-contained, efficiently ceremonious author, but can also shove in the dagger should the situation call for it. (Kudos to August Diehl as the gaunt and haunting Klaus and smaller roles like Anna Madeley as the savvy AP journalist, and a singing cameo by Joanna Kulig, star of Pawlikowski’s Cold War (2018).)

The second half of the trip, through Communist East Germany, achieves much of its critique simply by adjacency to the first: here is another postwar regime making its case, deploying soldiers singing in chorus (part of Pawlikowski’s carefully handpicked music) or an unctuous host claiming Goethe as a fellow traveler with Marxist materialism. The stolid elegance of the Manns’ West Germany Metropol hotel is replaced by intimidating checkpoints, deserted squares and cafés, and, like some hazy ruin in a Renaissance landscape painting, a cavernous structure harbouring a church organ. The Manns are, again, not fooled, but increasingly neither is Erika at all mollified by what her father has to offer. 

Pawlikowski partner Łukasz Żal shoots the dawning of the next West and East with subtly textured monochrome that avoids the eye-searing clarity that afflicts some digital period filmmaking of late and embraces dim 1940s interiors, which also suggest the exile bubble of the Manns. (There’s less too of the signature Pawlikowski-Zal negative space above people’s heads that risked affectation.) That such a film with so much weighing on its brisk mind can end with both hope and integrity is one final testament to its accomplishment.