A Mesmerising, Humanistic Reimagining of History’s Most Infamous Trial
Nuremberg arrives not as another dutiful historical reenactment, but as a brilliantly fresh and unsettlingly intimate exploration of the aftermath of World War II.
Rather than retreading the familiar courtroom beats of the Nuremberg Trials, this film pivots to a more psychologically treacherous vantage point: the mind of the psychiatrist tasked with evaluating Nazi leaders before they stand before the world.
What follows is a daunting yet deeply insightful descent into the nature of evil, obsession, and the fragile hope that, even amid atrocity, humanity and truth might still be found.
At the centre of this film is the psychiatrist-played with meticulous, coiled intensity by Rami Malek-whose assignment is to assess the mental fitness of the architects of the Third Reich.
Initially clinical, reserved, and resolute in his professional distance, he is soon drawn into a chillingly complex dynamic with none other than Hermann Göring, brought to monstrous, charismatic life by Russell Crowe.
What begins as an evaluation soon morphs into an unnerving intellectual duel, and then into something darker: an obsession with understanding evil, not in the abstract, but in the flesh, across the table, looking him straight in the eye.
It is James Vanderbilt’s screenplay adaptation that gives Nuremberg its distinctive power. Rather than reducing the Nazis to one-dimensional monsters or slipping into prurient fascination, Vanderbilt threads an extraordinarily difficult needle: he brings a humanistic front to this horrific aftermath without once excusing or diminishing the crimes. The writing consistently searches for the sliver of recognisable humanity in both victim and perpetrator-never to offer absolution, but to confront the most troubling question of all: how could human beings commit such acts, and what does it mean that they were, indeed, human?
The psychiatrist’s journey becomes a relentless search for compassion and truth in a world upended by atrocity. Vanderbilt refuses easy moral comfort. The film acknowledges that true evil is not some alien pathogen but something that can emerge from fear, vanity, weakness, and ideology. Through quiet conversations, verbal sparring, and meticulously staged interviews, we watch our protagonist edge closer to a terrifying realisation: to genuinely understand evil, he must allow himself, at least briefly, to see the world as these men saw it-and that act of imaginative empathy is itself a morally dangerous terrain.
Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring is extraordinary: a performance that is both repellent and magnetic, often within the same line of dialogue. He plays Göring not as a frothing caricature, but as an intelligent, manipulative, vain man who understands people far too well for comfort. Crowe leans into Göring’s showman quality-the wit, the bombast, the self-mythologizing-but undercuts it with flashes of chilling self-awareness. In the scenes with Malek, he exerts a gravitational pull, constantly trying to turn the psychiatrist into an audience, a confessor, even an unwilling accomplice in his self-justification.
Crowe’s Göring is terrifying precisely because he remains recognisably human: jovial one moment, ice-cold the next, always testing the boundaries of the man across from him.
Rami Malek gives what may well be one of the finest performances of his career. Where Crowe’s Göring expands to fill the room, Malek works in contained tremors: a tightening jaw, a shift of the eyes, small fractures appearing in an initially calm façade. As the psychiatrist becomes increasingly obsessed with understanding his subject, Malek allows us to see the cost of that obsession-first as exhaustion, then as moral and psychological disorientation.
He shows a man who entered this assignment believing in the clean separation between sanity and insanity, good and evil, and who slowly realises that such lines are not as sharp as he once reassured himself they were.
His arc-from clinical detachment to a haunted, hard-won clarity-is the emotional backbone of the film.
What makes this version of Nuremberg feel so fresh is its refusal to treat the trials as a static tableau of good judges versus evil defendants. Instead, it foregrounds the process of trying to comprehend unprecedented horror-intellectually, morally, and emotionally.
Vanderbilt’s script dares to find a glimmer of empathy, not with the ideology or the crimes, but with the tragic fact that the human psyche is capable of almost anything, depending on its environment and choices. It’s an empathy aimed less at the perpetrators than at the audience, inviting us to confront how fragile our own moral certainties might be when tested.
Nuremberg is daunting, relevant and necessary. It is a film about looking directly at evil without flinching, but also about the risk of staring too long into that abyss. Through a psychiatrist’s relentless pursuit of compassion and truth-even when it threatens to drag him under-the film finds something rare: a humanistic lens on one of history’s darkest chapters that neither excuses nor simplifies. Anchored by towering performances from Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, and a great supporting cast, and guided by James Vanderbilt’s incisive, deeply felt screenplay, Nuremberg stands as a vital, brilliantly reimagined take on a story we thought we already knew.
It doesn’t just recount history; it interrogates it-and, in doing so, quietly interrogates us.
Showing in South African cinemas from January 16
-Dirk Lombard Fourie