'The German Doctor' is a quiet movie, but with a dark undertone, telling of the sojourn of escaped Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in southern Argentina (in fact, the plot is fiction, but also a surmisable version of the truth). What I liked about this film is that it inclines us to see Mengele as monstrously wrong-headed, but still in some senses still human, while a late revelation still shocks us by revealing the true awfulness of this man. Also, the Patagonian scenery is beautiful and the use of creepy mechanical dolls as a visual metaphor for how Mengele sees humans is also nicely done. But we know that Mengele got away in the end, and the film also tells us (by dint of a voice over, delivered with hindsight) that the girl we see him experiment with also survives. And thus there's just not so much dramatic tension, and the movie is rather slow to advance beyond its premise: most of the impact comes at the end.
Review of The German Doctor
