Nuremberg Review: This Nazi Courtroom Drama Confuses Itself With What It's Trying To Say

In 1961, when the 13-year-old Israeli state was trying Adolf Eichmann for his role in orchestrating the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt surmised that “the trouble with [Adolf] Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” The statement is still provocative; we like our villains to be firmly placed on a binary of good and evil.

Many films have examined Arendt’s central examination of the so-called “banality of evil,” a label which is oft-misconstrued, improperly co-opted, and poorly defined. Jake Paltrow’s June Zero and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest more successfully understood that this banality, this normality was what made Nazism so “terrifying,” in Arendt’s words.

With Nuremberg, James Vanderbilt is less interested in showing Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) as “normal,” as he is in accentuating Hitler’s right-hand man as a charming charlatan. But this intentionality is miscalculated, and the film, bloated as it is with jarring tonal changes and thickly laid-on sentimentality, tilts so far into humanizing Nazis that it seems, at times, to apologize for the behavior of the high command.

Nuremberg’s Sympathies — And Its Tone — Are Consistently Confusing

The film is based on the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, which details how Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek, chewing more scenery than is available) sat with Göring and 22 other high-ranking Nazis to determine if they were mentally fit enough to stand trial — and to covertly supply potentially useful insight for prosecutors Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) and David Fyfe (Richard E. Grant). While Jackson figures out just how he might go about persecuting Göring and his comrades for war crimes, which had never previously been done in an international court, Kelley becomes besties with the fascist in increasingly warm interactions.

After the fall of Germany and Hitler’s death by suicide, Russian soldiers liberated the concentration camps, and America set up a secret prison in Mondorf, Luxembourg, overseen alongside the USSR, France, and the United Kingdom. Göring surrenders by driving up to a swarm of American soldiers, ripping off a piece of white cloth from an unseen woman’s underskirt, and waving it outside the car window, before asking for help with his luggage as if he’s rolled up to a hotel.

The introduction to Göring in this way, as a wry, chummy little fellow, illustrates a basic problem with the rest of Vanderbilt’s approach. It is one thing to humanize a Nazi to help us understand the psychology of someone who might commit mass murder (with the hope of stopping it again in the future); it is another thing entirely to spend two and a half hours painstakingly getting us to like the man.

Repeatedly, Vanderbilt gives voice to how a nation living under the harsh conditions of post-World War I was desperate for a leader to pull them out of the doldrums. That’s an appreciated perspective, but coming as it does from a swarm of preeminent Nazis feels a bit strange. Even stranger is the film’s insistence on giving us a montage of Kelley bonding with Göring and his hidden wife, Emmy, (Lotte Verbeek), and daughter. For context, Göring’s real-life daughter Edda was a Nazi herself; Nuremberg doesn’t so much prosecute Nazism as make apologia for it.

The two side-by-side plotlines belong to such starkly different films that the swaying from one to the next is consistently jarring. Both Malek and Shannon are given Joss Whedon-esque quips to deliver with straight faces (“Did you just blackmail the pope?“, “I don’t want to talk about it.”) while also tasked with treacly earnestness about the power of American liberalism. In other words, the film traffics in the same nationalism that it seeks to criticize.

Shifting between Kelley and Jackson and their concomitant efforts, Vanderbilt, whose screenwriting credits include The Amazing Spider-Man, Scream, Scream VI, Zodiac, and the Murder Mystery films, along with a slew of other action films, treats the entire affair like it’s superhero intrigue. Malek’s character is introduced like an American James Bond, shuffling cards with one hand while womanizing with a swooning stranger on a train. Upon welcoming the slew of Nazis to their prison, Col. Andrus (John Slattery) turns around in close-up to say, “Welcome to Nuremberg,” like a scene from The Rock. The same band of Nazis is introduced in an Oceans 11-style montage.

All that to say is that between the film’s earnest chamber drama scenes is a hokey fawning over the “proper” levers of democracy. Shannon’s character more closely resembles Jimmy Stewart’s from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a plucky idealistic lawyer who does things the “right way.” It all just feels a bit dated and a bit naive.

What makes the film even stranger is that it does, at its most lucid, provide much overlooked perspectives on the legacy of the Third Reich. It also crucially calls into question our present-day inability to spot fascism in the moment, suggesting, as Alain Resnais once did with Night and Fog, that we are perhaps ill-equipped to deal with the next Holocaust. The last 15 minutes or so of the film bleakly suggest that we are perhaps already living through a time when fascism is gripping the United States, and that we have turned a blind eye out of nationalistic hubris.

Appreciably, the film does things that many Holocaust films before it have never done. Namely, it calls out the Church’s support of the Nazi party in 1933 and its subsequent hypocrisy in hesitating to denounce it in 1945. Early scenes have Jackson being challenged by his colleagues with the very real concern that a trial of this kind only platforms fascism where it seeks to destroy it. The film especially does well to mention that hatred of this kind proliferates through legal channels and through the silence of the people who are not directly affected by prejudice.

But, in the end, Nuremberg is more confounding than it is true to its own intentions. At its extended length, the constant sympathy given to some of history’s most cold-blooded killers is maddening. Before Göring is sent off to die, Vanderbilt has the gall to give us a moment alone with him as he says a silent, sad goodbye to a picture of his wife. The filmmaker’s insistence on showing us that it was human beings who signed these decrees, who gassed Jews, who murdered some 10 million in the camps is all well and good, but does that mean we’re also supposed to care for their well-being, or that of their kindred, especially knowing what we know about their legacy?

Whatever the case, the film’s more enthralling moments are persistently handicapped by its shifty sympathies. It’s clear Vanderbilt sees Nazism as a pervasive disease, but the treatment of that disease as a charming curio only periodically works to cement his intentions to make all this feel prescient. The opening title card of the film says the movie is based on testimonies of those who lived and those who didn’t, but if we’re meant to feel sympathy with anyone, why choose the Nazi high command?

Nuremberg screened at the 2025 AFI Film Festival.