Nuremberg (2025)
Directed by James Vanderbilt
Nuremberg pursues a simple yet particularly risky idea: to investigate the Nazi ideal—the emblem of horror throughout the twentieth century—through a psychoanalytic lens, digging deep to interrogate the very nature of Evil. Perhaps to recognize and distill it. Perhaps to probe the human soul under the most extreme conditions and craft a drama grounded in the clash of personalities. What’s certain is that the film, written and directed by James Vanderbilt—who demonstrated in the Zodiac script his remarkable ability to immerse himself in obsession—revisits one of history’s most famous trials, following in the footsteps of Stanley Kramer and Yves Simoneau, using the courtroom as a necessary framework for its psychological inquiry.
The narrative’s core, adapted from Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, rests entirely on the confrontation between American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and Hermann Göring (for whom Russell Crowe seems a fitting incarnation, matching both the physical bulk and the complex, larger-than-life personality). Göring was the highest-ranking Third Reich official among those who chose not to take their own lives (the others, most notably, included Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg). Kelley, charged with assessing whether the Nazis were mentally fit to stand trial—at a time when the concept of “crimes against humanity” had yet to be conceived or codified—becomes the instrument of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (played by Michael Shannon) in his effort to persuade the Truman administration to publicly condemn Nazism’s top leadership, while attempting to determine whether they share some pathological trait that led them so naturally to commit their crimes.
Vanderbilt divides the story into two phases, the first clearly laying the groundwork for the second. The latter is exactly what one would expect from a film building toward a trial as its climax: the familiar dance of testimony and cross-examination, tense exchanges and strategic gambits designed to push the opposing side into a fatal misstep. There’s also a lengthy—far too lengthy—presentation of filmed documentation from the extermination camps shown in the courtroom. The inherent, well-known power of these images, even eighty years later, ultimately draws more attention to their excessive use than to any tragic desire to confront the court with the truth.
The first half proves more compelling, built around the tension and confrontation between the two protagonists, their emotional transference, the subtle manipulations, the unspoken game of cat and mouse. Vanderbilt skillfully crafts richly drawn characters and a tightly constructed parallel narrative, founded on eloquent dialogue and behaviors that ricochet between them until they begin to reflect each other in a kind of warped mirror. But here too, unfortunately, a damaging imbalance emerges—one that undermines both the film’s equilibrium and its ultimate meaning. Crowe’s Göring is monumental in his lucid, titanic villainy: magnetic, insinuating, even seductive. In this duel where Rami Malek is meant to expose the prisoner’s hidden intentions while falling under his spell, the match is hopelessly one-sided. The disparity is one of acting caliber, certainly, but also, more simply, of sheer screen presence. And here Nuremberg risks collapsing in on itself: allowing the hapless psychiatrist to be swallowed whole by Russell Crowe’s perverse charisma as the Reich Marshal isn’t merely a casting mistake—it’s an own goal in a botched attempt to harness the appeal of perpetually dangerous ambiguity. The seduction of Evil, viewed from a certain angle, invites misreading.
By the same token, when Göring turns the tables in one of their many heated exchanges, accusing the psychiatrist of American hypocrisy—outraged by extermination camps but not by atomic bombs, which were deemed self-defense rather than deliberate aggression on enemy soil—one feels a sharp and troubling revisionist chill, even while recognizing that this represents a historically defensible perspective. Nuremberg never resolves this tension, never clarifies—nor could it, in fairness—whether Evil is anthropological, individual, structural, political, or pathological in nature. The attempt to excavate the depths of the psyche remains superficial, never moving beyond the dramatic interplay of action and reaction between characters. The film lacks the philosophical depth required to plumb the deepest motives behind such extreme choices. More understated, though still evident, is the allusion to the present—to the possibility that Evil might take new form in another smooth, manipulative Göring, capable of pacifying the masses anywhere with his diseased and perverse allure. Any resemblance to contemporary America is, of course, entirely intentional.
