Cannes: Paweł Pawlikowski is Palmę-ready with "Fatherland"
Sunday, May 17, 2026 at 3:00PM 
by Elisa Giudici
Pawel Pawlikowski has always been a filmmaker of absence. Empty space, withheld emotion, silence so heavy it seems architectural: his cinema has long depended less on what characters say than on what lingers unresolved between them. Fatherland may be the purest expression of that sensibility, a film reduced to such an essential form that it almost appears to vanish while unfolding, only to return afterward with quiet, devastating force.
At first, it can seem unexpectedly modest by the standards of, say, Cold War. Fatherland is less sweeping, less immediately transporting. But the images begin resurfacing hours later. A corridor swallowed by shadow, a pause stretched slightly too long. A father and daughter speaking with perfect intelligence while emotionally disintegrating in front of one another. Pawlikowski has refined his cinema here into something severe and distilled, and the result is extraordinary...
Reuniting with cinematographer Łukasz Żal, the director returns once more to monochrome photography and constricted aspect ratios that imprison characters within meticulously balanced frames. The visual continuity with Ida and Cold War is unmistakable, but Fatherland pushes that aesthetic further toward austerity. Characters drift toward the margins of the image, pressed beneath ceilings and architecture as though history itself were physically forcing them into silence.
Set in postwar Germany, the film follows Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) as he returns to a country eager to reclaim him as both cultural monument and moral authority. East and West compete to absorb his prestige into their own ideological narratives. Pawlikowski immediately recognizes the bitter irony beneath the celebrations: Germany may have survived nazism, but another system of repression is already beginning to settle over Europe.
The political tension running beneath the film is constant, though rarely explicit. One of the most remarkable sequences arrives during a formal luncheon where a children’s choir performs the anthem of the newly formed East Germany. Nothing overtly threatening occurs, yet the scene becomes deeply unsettling through accumulation alone: the rigid politeness, the ceremonial atmosphere, the gradual realization that history is quietly preparing to repeat itself under different symbols
Music has always occupied a singular place in Pawlikowski’s cinema, and here again it becomes a form of emotional revelation. As in Cold War, songs expose truths the characters themselves cannot articulate. They function almost like fractures within a world sustained entirely by restraint and repression.
Sandra Hüller as "Erika Mann" in FATHERLAND © Agata Grzybowska
That repression defines not only the political landscape but the Mann family itself. Sandra Hüller gives one of the finest performances of her career as Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, and his closest companion during the tour. Hüller works almost entirely through control and containment. Rare smiles arrives half-muted, every silence feels charged with things left unsaid. Erika moves through the film with the exhausted composure of someone who has spent years transforming emotional catastrophe into intellectual discipline.
The collaboration between actress and director feels uncannily precise. Hüller’s style of performance, intensely interior yet constantly vibrating with contradiction beneath the surface, mirrors Pawlikowski’s filmmaking perfectly. Few actors working today understand stillness the way she does. She can turn a withheld reaction into the emotional center of an entire sequence.
Hovering over the film like a specter is her brother Klaus, played by August Diehl with haunted melancholy. Having fled Germany and rejected both fascism and his father’s emotional detachment, Klaus becomes the family’s open wound, the absence exposing every fracture the others are desperately attempting to ignore.
Gradually, Pawlikowski transforms the Manns into a metaphor for postwar Germany itself: intellectually brilliant, culturally sophisticated, spiritually exhausted, incapable of honestly confronting its own damage. Family members speak elegantly, think brilliantly, and fail one another constantly.
One of the film’s most devastating scenes involves a dissident privately informing Thomas Mann that political prisoners have now replaced Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald. The revelation lands with terrible force, yet what matters even more is Mann’s inability to respond. By then, another emotional collapse has already entered the room through Erika, who finally confronts the suffocating emotional vacuum at the center of the family.
What makes Fatherland so remarkable is Pawlikowski’s refusal to turn any of this into melodrama. The film remains unnervingly composed throughout. Conversations unfold quietly and indirectly, circling around emotional truths rather than naming them outright. Even the mother remains largely offscreen, heard through distant telephone conversations like a fading voice from a family already dissolving into fragments.
Thematically, this may be Pawlikowski’s harshest film. It is not simply about one political system replacing another, but about repression surviving by changing form. Nazism gives way to Soviet control. Public authority mirrors private emotional tyranny. Intellectual sophistication becomes another mechanism for avoiding truth. Despite all of this the film never feels schematic or thesis-driven. Pawlikowski works through implication, omission, and atmosphere rather than argument. References to queerness within the Mann family are understated but deeply significant, folded naturally into the film’s larger portrait of lives constrained by ideological and emotional performance.
The radical subtraction shaping Fatherland recalls late Michelangelo or Kawabata, artists who spent their later careers stripping their work closer and closer to pure essence. Pawlikowski removes everything nonessential here. Even Joanna Kulig’s brief musical appearance feels less like a cameo than an echo from another emotional world, Cold War lingering at the edge of the frame like memory itself.
FATHERLAND still © Agata Grzybowska
What is astonishing is how complete the film feels at only 82 minutes. Nothing is wasted. Every scene contributes to an emotional architecture that reveals itself fully only in the extraordinary final movement. Pawlikowski structures the entire film around that conclusion and takes an enormous risk in doing so. Fortunately, the ending lands with overwhelming precision.
By its final shot, Fatherland becomes almost unbearably sad: a story about people surviving one historical catastrophe only to realize another has already begun. It is a film built from whispers, absences, and emotional ruins, and one that feels destined to remain firmly in the Palme conversation throughout the rest of Cannes.
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