Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil in 1963, and since then the phrase has been digested, hollowed out, and turned into a kind of intellectual cliché. Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian director in Berlin exile, has set out to return to that formulation its original horror. Not because the film contains much violence (there is almost none), and not because it depicts camp scenes (there are none at all). But because it depicts a life. A normal, sunny, well-fed life — the life of a man who murdered thousands and feels about this nothing except a mild irritation at the necessity of hiding.

Josef Mengele — the "Angel of Death" of Auschwitz — died in 1979 at a Brazilian seaside resort, swimming in the sea. He was never caught, tried, or punished. He spent thirty years in South America, changing names and documents, growing bored, eating, drinking wine, keeping diaries — and in those diaries he continued to regard himself as a scientist unjustly hounded by an ignorant world.

Serebrennikov adapted the novel by French writer Olivier Guez, which won the Prix Renaudot in 2017, and made a decisive choice from which another director might have shrunk: he constructed the entire world of the film in the first person, from the inside. We see the world through Mengele's eyes — the same tropical splendour, the same émigré neighbours, the same German community members who shelter him and gradually tire of him. The monster's perspective is not the monster's exoneration; it is something considerably more disturbing: proof that monsters are unaware of their own monstrousness, and that this is precisely what makes them so dangerous.

Serebrennikov — a director with a particular, deliberately theatrical sense of space — works here against his own instincts. Leto was explosive; The Wife of Tchaikovsky, claustrophobically lush; Limonov, brazenly vital. The Disappearance of Mengele is shot with icy restraint: static frames, long pauses, South American sunlight falling with equal indifference upon the righteous and those who performed experiments on human beings in Auschwitz. It is precisely this restraint that kills — because against it, Mengele's inner monologue, his self-justifications, his grievances against the world for failing to recognise his "scientific" contribution, ring like the purest newspeak — long before Orwell introduced the term.

Serebrennikov himself shot this film in exile, received the Légion d'Honneur on the Cannes red carpet, and spoke words about those who "rot in prisons for their beliefs." The parallel is obvious, and the director neither hides it nor hammers it home deliberately — it simply exists as background, as one more layer of film beneath the image. People flee justice and go on living. Mengele is the most famous, but far from the last, example.

The film's weakness is that Serebrennikov occasionally allows coldness to tip into estrangement: certain scenes function as illustrations of a thesis rather than as living tissue. Mengele is built flawlessly as a concept, but occasionally ceases to breathe as a human being. Though perhaps this is precisely the director's most accurate statement: the human being genuinely stopped breathing — in any human sense — a very long time ago, long before he crossed the threshold of Auschwitz. Everything else is simply the long dying-out of something that was never really alive.