Nuremberg 2025 Review: Staring Into the Dangerous Seduction of Evil – Beragampengetahuan

Among the excessive amount of Holocaust films produced annually—while countless other atrocities throughout history remain cinematically unexamined—Nuremberg (2025) arrives as another addition to an already crowded genre. The Holocaust maintains its position as perhaps the most cinematically revisited genocide in film history, raising questions about which atrocities receive artistic attention and which remain in historical shadow. Yet the question remains: how does this particular film stand among the flock?

James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is a film haunted by doubles, mirrors, and the terrifying suggestion that the distance between psychiatrist and patient, observer and observed, hunter and prey, might be far narrower than we dare imagine. Based on Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the film recounts the historically documented relationship between U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Hitler’s second-in-command, during the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials. What emerges is not merely a procedural drama about postwar justice, but a psychological horror story about what happens when you stare too long into the abyss—and the abyss stares back with a charming smile.

A Troubling Symmetry

The historical Kelley spent approximately 80-90 hours with Nazi prisoners over five months, administering Rorschach tests and IQ evaluations to 22 high-ranking officials. His mission was ostensibly clinical: determine fitness to stand trial. But Kelley concluded that the defendants “were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are,” finding no distinct “Nazi pathology” save one case of brain injury. This finding—deeply uncomfortable then and now—suggests that genocidal evil requires no special psychological deformity, only the right circumstances acting upon ordinary human capacities.

The film’s most chilling element gains power from its historical accuracy: on New Year’s Day 1958, witnessed by his wife, father, and three children, Kelley ingested a capsule of potassium cyanide—the same method Göring used to cheat the hangman twelve years earlier. While Kelley’s family disputed reports that the capsule came from Nuremberg, the parallel remains inescapable. Two men, ideological opposites, choosing identical theatrical exits—both selecting cyanide as “a dramatic way of making an exit, and a way of making a statement while making your exit”.

The Banality of Evil Meets the Seduction of the Monster

Nuremberg exists in productive tension with Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” proposed after the Eichmann trial. Kelley’s conclusions anticipated Arendt’s thesis: these were not demonic aberrations but frighteningly normal men operating within a catastrophic system. Yet the film complicates this by foregrounding Göring’s charisma, intelligence (Kelley measured his IQ at 138), and psychological sophistication. This is not Eichmann’s bureaucratic mediocrity but something more dangerous—evil that understands precisely what it’s doing and possesses the rhetorical skill to justify it.

The film operates within what we might call a “therapeutic Gothic” genre—it borrows the structure of Gothic fiction where a rational protagonist enters a haunted space and becomes corrupted by proximity to darkness. Kelley’s Nuremberg is not merely a prison but a liminal zone where the normal rules of professional distance collapse. The psychiatrist enters believing in his scientific objectivity, his ability to dissect without being infected. The film systematically dismantles this hubris.

Performance as Ideological Battleground

The critical discourse around the film has fractured along predictable lines regarding Malek’s performance, with some reviewers finding it overwrought and others compelling. This disagreement is instructive: Malek’s choices—the twitchy mannerisms, the theatrical reactions—can be read not as failed naturalism but as deliberate signalling of a man already fragmenting under the weight of his assignment. If Kelley is meant to be our rational surrogate, Malek refuses to make him comfortable or stable. His performance suggests a consciousness aware that it’s being invaded, a professional mask cracking in real beragampengetahuan.

Crowe’s Göring, by contrast, operates with the assured gravity of a man who knows exactly who he is. Where Kelley fractures, Göring consolidates. The performance brilliance lies in making monstrosity feel like confidence, making us understand precisely how such a man could command loyalty and inspire terror. When Göring told Kelley that in 50 or 60 years there would be “statues of Hermann Göring all over Germany… Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home,” he was not delusional but enacting a propaganda campaign that extended even into his own condemnation.

Doctor-Patient Confidentiality in Service of War Crimes

The film’s most intellectually rigorous element concerns the collapse of medical ethics. Historical documents reveal that Kelley faced fundamental questions about his role: was he a psychiatrist or a soldier? Were his subjects patients or prisoners? The film dramatises this through Jackson’s demand that Kelley provide intelligence on the defendants’ legal strategies—a flagrant violation of doctor-patient confidentiality that Kelley rationalised as serving justice.

But here the film achieves something remarkable: it refuses to fully condemn Kelley for this breach. How can therapeutic neutrality apply when your patient orchestrated industrial genocide? The film inhabits this moral vertigo without offering easy resolutions. It suggests that in confronting absolute evil, all our ethical frameworks—legal, medical, philosophical—reveal themselves as contingent, provisional, possibly inadequate.

The Gothic Architecture of Complicity

The visual grammar of Nuremberg consistently emphasises enclosure, surveillance, and the collapse of boundaries. Vanderbilt shoots the prison interviews in increasingly claustrophobic frames, suggesting not merely physical confinement but psychological contamination. As sessions progress, shot-reverse-shot patterns begin to match Kelley and Göring more closely in framing—they’re becoming compositional mirrors even as they remain ideological opposites.

The film’s most potent symbol is the correspondence between Göring and his family that Kelley facilitates—literally making himself the conduit through which the Nazi’s humanity flows. Historically, Göring asked Kelley to adopt his daughter Edda if his wife died, a request that illustrates the grotesque intimacy that developed. The man responsible for the murder of millions wants his child raised by his American examiner. It’s a perverse inversion of trust that the film uses to demonstrate how proximity to power—even evil power—creates its own seductive gravity.

Suicide as Statement and Defeat

After Göring’s cyanide suicide hours before his scheduled execution, Kelley called it “a skilful, even brilliant, finishing touch”—a comment that reveals how thoroughly the psychiatrist had internalised his subject’s perspective. When Kelley himself chose cyanide twelve years later, he enacted not imitation but recognition. Both men understood suicide not merely as escape but as a final assertion of control, a rejection of the narratives others would impose.

The film’s closing text revealing Kelley’s fate operates as a devastating coda. Historical records show that Kelley “spent the rest of his life in vain warning about the possibility of a future regime parallel to the Nazis” before his death. His warnings went unheeded—not because he was wrong but because his conclusions were too uncomfortable. If the architects of genocide were psychologically normal, then the prevention of future atrocities requires not the identification of monsters but the systemic dismantling of conditions that enable ordinary people to commit extraordinary evil.

The Film’s Urgent Present Tense

Nuremberg achieves its power by refusing to remain safely historical. Vanderbilt stages it as a drama of 1945 that speaks directly to 2025. The film’s opening voiceover mentions contemporary state violence, forced detentions, the normalisation of dehumanisation—a deliberate framing that positions the Nuremberg trials not as the resolution of a particular evil but as a warning about evil’s permanent availability.

This is where the film’s critical reception diverges most sharply. Those who find it too heavy-handed miss the point that the heavy hand is necessary—the film argues that we’ve failed to learn Nuremberg’s central lesson, that we’re still susceptible to the same seductions, the same rationalisations. The “whataboutism” scene where Göring deflects by citing Allied war crimes (Dresden, Hiroshima) is not meant to create moral equivalence but to demonstrate how sophisticated evil uses legitimate critique as a shield.

Can Evil Be Understood?

Nuremberg arrives at no comfortable resolution because history offers none. While Kelley concluded the Nazis were sane and normal, psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who succeeded him, diagnosed Göring as “an aggressive psychopath”—radically different conclusions from the same evidence. The film suggests that our frameworks for understanding extreme malevolence may be fundamentally inadequate, that we’re trapped between pathologising evil (which falsely reassures us that only the sick can commit atrocities) and normalising it (which offers no clear prevention strategy).

Kelley’s tragedy was that he understood this impasse intellectually but couldn’t survive it emotionally. He spent 80-90 hours trying to dissect evil, and in the process, internalised something of its nihilism. The film’s power lies in showing us a brilliant mind destroyed not by infection with Nazi ideology but by proximity to its emptiness—the realisation that behind the ideological rhetoric and the historical justifications, there was only ego, ambition, and the banal human capacity for self-deception.

A beragampengetahuan We Cannot Look Away From

Nuremberg is not a perfect film—its pacing occasionally drags, some supporting characters remain sketches, and its contemporary parallels sometimes overwhelm its historical specificity. But these imperfections feel almost necessary to the project. A more polished, contained film would betray the messiness of its subject matter. Evil does not conform to dramatic structure, and neither does the attempt to understand it.

The film’s greatest achievement is making us complicit in Kelley’s seduction. We, too, become fascinated by Göring’s intelligence, his wit, his grandiosity. We, too, find ourselves understanding how someone could spend hours conversing with a genocidal architect and leave feeling intellectually stimulated rather than simply horrified. And we, too, must reckon with what that fascination says about our own capacities for rationalisation.

In the end, Nuremberg functions as both a historical document and a warning. It reminds us that the distance between the civilised and the monstrous is not nearly as vast as we’d like to believe, that the tools we use to understand evil—psychiatry, law, intellectual analysis—can themselves become instruments of its normalisation. Kelley went to Nuremberg to measure the Nazi mind and found it disturbingly similar to his own. That recognition, more than any cyanide capsule, is what killed him. And it’s the recognition Nuremberg forces upon its audience, making us ask: How different are we, really? And in what circumstances might that difference collapse?

The film offers no comfort, and rightly so. Comfort would be complicity.

Nuremberg in the Context of Trial Cinema

Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg enters a cinematic conversation that spans over six decades, positioning itself against two major predecessors that have shaped how audiences understand these trials. The most towering comparison remains Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which took a different approach entirely—focusing not on the primary International Military Tribunal of 1945-46 but on the subsequent Judges’ Trial of 1947. Where Kramer’s film examined how German jurists became complicit in genocide by perverting the law itself, Vanderbilt’s focuses on the psychological architecture of evil through the Göring-Kelley relationship. Judgment at Nuremberg operated as a courtroom procedural and moral philosophy seminar, with Spencer Tracy’s Judge Haywood serving as audience surrogate wrestling with questions of collective guilt and individual responsibility. Its power is derived from showing how ordinary professionals—lawyers and judges—became instruments of mechanised murder through incremental moral compromises.

The critical difference lies in scope and intention. Kramer’s film asked whether an entire nation could be guilty, whether following orders constituted moral exculpation, and whether Cold War pragmatism should trump justice. The film’s devastating coda—revealing that by 1961, none of the 99 defendants sentenced to prison terms remained incarcerated—served as bitter commentary on geopolitical expediency overwhelming legal principles. Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, conversely, narrows its focus to the seductive charisma of a single defendant and the corrosive effect of proximity to evil. Where Judgment at Nuremberg warned about systemic complicity and the fragility of justice, the 2025 film warns about the personal vulnerability of those who believe themselves immune to manipulation.

The 2000 TNT miniseries Nuremberg, directed by Yves Simoneau with Alec Baldwin as Robert H. Jackson and Brian Cox as Göring, occupies the middle ground. At three hours, it provided comprehensive coverage of the primary trial’s procedural elements—the political negotiations between Allied powers, the documentary evidence presented, and the cross-examinations. Cox’s Göring was universally praised as cunning and charismatic, creating an earlier template for understanding the Nazi leader’s courtroom performance. However, the miniseries suffered from typical television-movie compromises: an entirely fictional romantic subplot between Jackson and his assistant (Jill Hennessy) that critics uniformly condemned as trivialising the material, and a tendency toward didactic moralising that undercut its dramatic power.

What distinguishes Vanderbilt’s 2025 version is its willingness to make the audience complicit in Kelley’s seduction. The 2000 miniseries kept viewers at a safe distance—we watch Baldwin’s Jackson heroically prosecute, we observe Cox’s Göring manipulate, but we’re never implicated in the process. Similarly, Judgment at Nuremberg positioned viewers as jury members evaluating evidence and reaching conclusions. Vanderbilt’s film operates differently: by centring the intimate Kelley-Göring sessions rather than the courtroom itself, it forces viewers into Kelley’s position—spending extended beragampengetahuan with a charming, intelligent monster and feeling the gravitational pull of his personality. The film’s courage lies in its refusal to provide the courtroom catharsis that both previous films offered.

There’s also The Eichmann Show (2015), which approached Nazi trials through a meta-cinematic lens—examining how producer Milton Fruchtman and blacklisted director Leo Hurwitz televised Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. That film asked whether turning genocide testimony into televised drama inherently violated the victims’ experiences, whether cameras could capture evil, whether Eichmann’s impassive face during horrific witness testimony revealed the “banality of evil” or simply the opacity of a psychopath. It served as commentary on our relationship with mediated horror—the ethics of watching atrocity as entertainment. Vanderbilt’s film, by contrast, is less interested in the mechanics of representation than in the psychology of engagement.

Where Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg most succeeds relative to its predecessors is in its contemporary urgency. Judgment at Nuremberg was made sixteen years after the events it depicted, achieving the distance of historical drama. The 2000 miniseries arrived in an era when Nazi trials had long ended and seemed safely historical. But Vanderbilt’s 2025 film cannot escape—and deliberately embraces—the parallels between 1945 Nuremberg and 2025 political realities. The film’s references to state detention without trial, dehumanisation of targeted populations, and the normalisation of authoritarian rhetoric aren’t subtle, nor are they meant to be. In this sense, Nuremberg functions less as a historical recreation than as a contemporary warning disguised in period costume.

The film’s aesthetic choices also distinguish it. Where Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg used predominantly static courtroom shots befitting 1961 filmmaking conventions (though revolutionary for their beragampengetahuan in incorporating actual concentration camp footage), and the 2000 miniseries employed conventional television cinematography, Vanderbilt creates an increasingly claustrophobic visual grammar. The early Kelley-Göring sessions are shot in relatively open frames; as their relationship deepens, the camera tightens, creating oppressive intimacy. By the final sessions, shot-reverse-shots frame the two men nearly identically—a visual argument about their dangerous symmetry that neither previous film attempted.

Ultimately, Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is neither superior nor inferior to its predecessors but serves a different function. Judgment at Nuremberg remains the definitive legal and philosophical examination of Nazi accountability, a film about institutions and systems. The 2000 miniseries provides the most comprehensive procedural account of the trial itself. But Vanderbilt’s film offers something neither previous version dared: an examination of evil not as abstraction or historical artefact but as seductive, present, and perpetually available. It’s the most psychologically disturbing of the three precisely because it refuses the comfort of historical distance. Kelley’s 1958 suicide isn’t presented as a tragic aberration but as a logical conclusion—what happens when you spend too long trying to understand monsters without adequate protection for your own humanity.

The film’s position in the canon is thus as provocation rather than summation. It doesn’t replace the courtroom procedural of the 2000 miniseries or the moral philosophy of Judgment at Nuremberg, but it does something those films couldn’t or wouldn’t: it makes evil intimate, makes us feel its seductive pull, and forces us to reckon with the uncomfortable reality that understanding atrocity doesn’t protect us from replicating it. In that sense, among all the films about Nuremberg, Vanderbilt’s may be the most necessary for 2025—a moment when the lessons of those trials feel urgently relevant and terrifyingly unlearned.