Allergic to blockbusters? See Wakolda

Wakolda is not a sunny film for a sunny day, just so you’re aware, but as there is so little else around — August is a hopeless month for films; August is a dumping ground for the sub-par — you are going to have to take that on the chin, bear it as best you can, and while this is not sunny it is, at least, masterfully made. Set in Argentina in 1960, it’s a fictional imagining of how a German doctor insinuates himself on a family, and how that doctor turns out to be Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’ from the Nazi concentration camps. It’s not a thriller exactly. Instead, it is an unsettling, atmospheric, mood-driven piece, which, I should add, just so you’re aware, also features creepy dolls. That’s how un-sunny it is.

This is the third film from Lucía Puenzo (XXY, The Fish Child), who, in this instance, directed, produced, wrote the script, and also the book on which it is based. (This makes me tired just thinking about it.) It is fictional, but with a factual element, as Mengele did flee Europe for South America after the war although, unlike Eichmann, he always managed to evade capture. (He died in Brazil in 1979; drowned in an accident, the poor love.) Our story starts when the doctor (Alex Brendemühl, who looks like a disturbing version of Omar Sharif, as if Sharif weren’t disturbing enough) and the family (husband, wife, three children) meet on the road as they are all travelling to the same remote village where the doctor appears to be expected, and the family are due to take over a hotel. The village is a German-speaking, Nazi-sympathising enclave where  the houses are built like Alpine chalets, old photos reveal schoolchildren performing the ‘Sieg Heil!’, and everyone just about stops short of wearing Lederhosen.