Synopsis
Adapted from Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the film brings back to the screen the first international trial for war crimes, focusing on an aspect often overlooked: the psychiatric examination of the defendants prior to the opening of the proceedings.
The film’s structure does not follow that of a conventional courtroom drama, but rather adopts a clinical focus on how the human mind can be examined under extreme historical pressure. Its central figure, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), is not an emotional hero but a rigorous observer: his task is to assess the mental competence of the Nazi leadership, not to understand or justify their actions. The narrative deliberately avoids psychological indulgence, instead foregrounding the tension between formal diagnosis and historical reality.
The film’s structure does not follow that of a conventional courtroom drama, but rather adopts a clinical focus on how the human mind can be examined under extreme historical pressure. Its central figure, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), is not an emotional hero but a rigorous observer: his task is to assess the mental competence of the Nazi leadership, not to understand or justify their actions. The narrative deliberately avoids psychological indulgence, instead foregrounding the tension between formal diagnosis and historical reality.
Review
3 min read
Reviewed by Fabian
· 16. December 2025
The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.
R. G. Collingwood
R. G. Collingwood
Nuremberg does not treat the trial as a moral spectacle, but as a field of verification. The film narrows its focus: before the verdict, before history, there is a technical question. Are the defendants mentally fit to stand trial? The answer is not narrative; it is procedural.
Psychiatry enters the scene not to explain evil, but to measure its functionality. The Nazi leaders are observed as operational subjects: intact cognitive abilities, coherent language, argumentative strategy. No delusion, no evident fracture. Diagnosis does not lead to absolution, but to confirmation. They are sane. Therefore, responsible.
The confrontation between Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley and Hermann Göring unfolds on this level. It is neither an ideological clash nor a psychological duel. It is a negotiation over the control of discourse. Göring understands the logic of the examination better than the man administering it: he responds, deflects, ironizes, tests the limits of the clinical instrument. He does not deny the facts; he reorganizes them. His lucidity is not a character trait, but a methodological problem.
The film avoids every emotional shortcut. Psychiatry does not become a confessional, nor a moral tribunal. It is an apparatus tasked with determining whether the law can proceed without fracture. In this sense, Nuremberg reveals its most political core: declaring the defendants insane would have simplified the narrative, but emptied the trial of its meaning. Mental normality becomes the very condition of guilt.
There is no indulgence, but no demonization either. The defendants are not monsters, nor exceptional clinical cases. They are men capable of understanding, choosing, organizing. The film insists on this point with an almost bureaucratic coldness. Any attempt to shift the discourse toward trauma, ideology as pathology, or collective madness is neutralized.
The direction supports this approach through a controlled mise-en-scène, devoid of emphasis. Spaces are functional, dialogue reduced to essentials, pauses more eloquent than words. The film does not seek identification, but distance. The viewer is not asked to feel, but to register.
Nuremberg thus works against a recurring temptation: using psychiatry to render evil exceptional. Here the opposite occurs. Evil is administered by competent subjects. Mental science does not dissolve it; it certifies it. And precisely for this reason, it makes judgment possible.
Despite this shift in perspective, Nuremberg ultimately fails to assert itself decisively in terms of originality. The subject has been traversed by decades of cinema, and the adoption of a psychiatric lens, however rigorous, remains within an already codified perimeter. The subtraction of horror—an informed and defensible choice—results in formal control, but does not generate a radical perceptual rupture. What is missing is that residue of unrepresented yet tangible inhumanity that The Zone of Interest was able to construct through absence, off-screen space, and the intolerability of the ordinary. By comparison, Nuremberg appears more as an exercise in lucidity than as an artistic gesture capable of reorienting the gaze: correct, measured, yet unable to truly transform historical trauma into a sensory experience.
Crime becomes absolute when it is committed without a sense of guilt.
Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
