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They say curiosity killed the cat, but in Nuremberg, it nearly undoes the man who tried to understand monsters. What begins as a study in justice slowly turns into a duel of intellects, where logic flirts with lunacy and empathy becomes a trap. This isn’t your usual courtroom drama, it’s a moral minefield disguised as conversation, where silence speaks louder than the gavel.
The Plot: Between A Mind And A Monster
Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, is sent to assess the mental fitness of captured Nazi leaders, including Hermann Göring, played by a disturbingly composed Russell Crowe. On paper, it’s a routine psychological evaluation. In practice, it becomes a haunting game of control, ego, and blurred empathy.
Göring doesn’t arrive in shackles, he drives up, waving a white cloth torn from a woman’s underskirt, and politely asks American soldiers to help with his luggage. That’s the tone Vanderbilt sets from the start: charm laced with decay.
What follows are long, tense interrogations where Kelley’s fascination with his subject becomes the film’s real trial. Can understanding evil ever be innocent? Can empathy exist without consequence? By the time Kelley realises that studying Göring is a form of hypnosis, he’s already under its spell.
Where Humanity Ends (And The Questions Begin)
The film doesn’t shy away from its moral discomfort. It forces you to ask: Should empathy have boundaries? When Göring mourns in silence before his death by cyanide, whispering a soft “abracadabra” to his own end, it’s not redemption, it’s rot disguised as reflection.
Vanderbilt’s restrained direction saves Nuremberg from melodrama. Even when the courtroom echoes with “Heil Hitler” or archival footage from the Belsen concentration camp appears, it’s handled with chilling restraint rather than spectacle. Dariusz Wolski’s crisp visuals and Brian Tyler’s stark score underline a simple truth: evil rarely arrives screaming; it often whispers through order and civility.
“The only cue to what man can do,” the film reminds us, “is what man has done.” And that’s why Nuremberg hits home in 2025. Beneath its period costumes and old-school gravitas lies a very modern anxiety, that fascism doesn’t die; it merely rebrands.
Performances That Linger Like Smoke
Rami Malek plays Kelley with precision, quiet fragility and just a bit too sure of himself. He starts as the man holding the clipboard, convinced he’s in control, only to realise he’s the one being dissected. There’s a tragic vanity in his belief that intellect can outwit evil, and Malek lets that unravelling simmer in every glance.
Russell Crowe is disturbingly magnetic as Göring, never monstrous, just unnervingly civil. His charm feels like a trap; every smile is rehearsed, every pause deliberate. Together, Malek and Crowe are mesmerising, a doctor and a devil locked in a duel that feels both cerebral and chillingly intimate.
Michael Shannon, as prosecutor Robert Jackson, lends the story its moral backbone, while Richard E. Grant’s wry delivery adds a necessary flicker of levity.
The Verdict: A Slow Burn That Smoulders
Nuremberg isn’t here to thrill you; it’s here to sit beside you long after, whispering inconvenient questions in your ear. James Vanderbilt trades spectacle for subtlety, and it works, mostly because the unease feels earned, not engineered. The film doesn’t moralise; it observes, letting the horror of civility do the talking. It’s witty in the way intellect can be dangerous, and clever enough to know that understanding evil doesn’t absolve it.