Fatherland Review: The Good German

The 2026 midterm elections have raised a certain hope in America: that the last half century of a rising tide of right-wing extremism and a nascent dictatorship cannot only be defeated but can be ended. The question now is, what’s next? That’s an issue of national identity, a concern shared with Fatherland. In this historical drama, director Paweł Pawlikowski completes what can loosely be called his Cold War trilogy that began with 2014’s Oscar-winning Ida and continued in 2019 with the Cannes-lauded and Oscar-nominated Cold War. The connecting thread – beyond the silvery cinematography of Lukasz Zal – is how Pawlikowski looks at that era as a continuation of the damage and boundary shifts inflicted by World War II, and shows that the political is always personal. He also does this from a profoundly Central European perspective.

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