Nuremberg (2025): Autopsy of a Genocide

Nuremberg (2025), directed by James Vanderbilt, is not a historical film in the usual sense of the term: it is, rather, a thought experiment applied to cinema, intended to demonstrate that horror does not need madness to exist, only sufficiently organised thought.

Set in 1945, the story focuses on the intense confrontation between Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) and military psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), tasked with assessing the mental fitness of the leading Nazi officials detained before their trial.

Inspired by Jack El-Hai’s nonfiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the film rejects the grand narrative of judgement, inviting viewers to observe history through the psychologies that helped write it, thus offering a sharper instrument of critical thought.

Göring and Kelley: narcissism as the structure of evil and the observer’s crisis

The figure of Hermann Göring dominates the film, played by Russell Crowe with a commanding screen presence that never seeks caricatural excess. Not a madman, not a monster, but something more disturbing: a figure of astonishing inner solidity.

His mind does not appear shattered by the acts he has committed; on the contrary, it functions according to a stable internal logic, self-sufficient and impervious to doubt. He does not deny violence; he organises it. He does not suppress responsibility; he redistributes it within a wider system.

Douglas Kelley’s need to classify and diagnose gradually and imperceptibly becomes a source of weakness and vulnerability, because his desire to understand and uncover moral cracks rests on an ethically inadequate method.

Direction and style: the unease of precision

James Vanderbilt chooses a directorial approach that interweaves documentary rigour with the pathos of a psychological thriller, deliberately forgoing spectacle and working through restraint. The spaces are austere and functional, and oppressive for that very reason.

The dialogue is tense, measured and often punctuated by silences that carry as much weight as words. The burden of formal order and the bleak, rigorous atmosphere of the post-war period become the unsettling backdrop to a moral crisis that remains unresolved and that the new bureaucracy cannot resolve.

Although set in the past, Nuremberg insistently speaks to the present, starting with its very casting choices.

In an age that demands quick answers and clear-cut judgements, the film asserts the right to complexity without offering any catharsis, continuing to work on the viewer even after the closing credits.