The woman seems so calm, so cool, until the slap. For the bulk of Fatherland, the latest film from Oscar-winning Polish filmmaker Pawel Palikowski (Ida, Cold War), Sandra Hüller is the human pillar of the movie. In real life, her character Erika Mann
was a war journalist, a racecar driver and, like Hüller, an actor. In Palikowski’s movie, she’s the chauffeur and caretaker of her father Thomas Mann, as the celebrated German novelist returns to the broken, now-bifurcated country of his birth. (Erika did not actually accompany the exiled Death in Venice author on his trip back to Germany in 1949, but you appreciate the poetic license given the film’s title.)
Erika’s real job is to be a ballast for what will be a turbulent reminder that you can never truly go home again. She dutifully translates his dad’s answers at a press conference, arranges their lodgings, deals with the death threats and fields phone calls from her despairing brother Klaus. Erika shaves her dad’s face in the morning, she drives him around in a monstrously large Buick in the afternoons, and in the evening, she makes sure that he shows up for the reception held in his honor — Thomas is receiving two awards, one in the capitalistic West Germany and the other in the communist East. As played by Hüller and the veteran German actor Hanns Zischler, they’re both operating in a mutually beneficial muted register. “You and your father make a good double act,” someone tells her. Erika replies with a characteristically tight, polite smile.
Then Erika runs into her ex-husband, a theater legend who was once Hermann Göring’s favorite thespian and helped push Nazi propaganda leading up to the war. He’s also returned to Germany after serving time in a Russian gulag, and is ready to resume his position as a “patriotic” artist. The careerist has also made life hell for Erika and her family. As he insults his ex-wife’s cosmopolitan lifestyle and the connections she’s made through her father, the camera stays on Erika’s face as it slowly, very slowly, falls. Right when we cut to a reverse shot behind her, she slaps the rat bastard hard across the face. Several scenes later, we watch as Erika sits silently in a dark hotel room as a gaggle of drunks sing old songs outside. She opens the window and, accelerating from 0 to 60mph in a heartbeat, screams “SHUT UP, FASCIST SCUM!” Welcome to the breaking point.
Fatherland, which opens in limited release this weekend and will hopefully be in an arthouse theater near you soon (and on its distributor Mubi’s streaming service), has already been garnering a lot of praise on the festival circuit; Palikowski took home the Best Director award at Cannes for his austere black-and-white drama. From its sly humor to the tragic way Mann’s story exemplifies that no one — not even artists — are exempt from history, its monochromatic tableaux of a nation in various states of ruin to one of the most quietly heartbreaking endings in recent memory, the movie’s a triumph for all involved.
For Hüller, however, this is just one particularly high point in what’s become a seriously banner year for the German movie star. With the possible exception of Anne Hathaway (who saw five films released over a period of nine months), no one is a stronger contender for the cinematic MVP award in 2026 than her. Thanks to a quartet of notable, if occasionally divisive works that graced screens this year, Hüller has gifted us with performances that ground stories taking place everywhere from a 17th century Protestant village to the 21st century’s final frontier. She laughs. She cries. She rages. And also, she does this:
This is not the first time Hüller has taken a pop staple in a movie and made it her own — in Toni Erdmann, the 2016 Maren Ade movie that introduced many moviegoers to the prolific German theater actor, she belts out a banger version of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” at a house party. But the Oscar nominee will now be forever associated with the man known as Hazza. Cast as Eva, the head of an international organization trying to save the planet in Project Hail Mary, Hüller spends this sci-fi blockbuster strictly on terra firma, acting as a socially awkward, deadpan foil for Ryan Gosling’s reluctant astronaut. She’s not trying to steal virtually every scene she’s in, yet her supporting character has a way of stealthily slipping the scenes in her pocket before shuffling away.
Gosling had heard his costar crooning something in between takes on set, however, which is how the now-celebrated karaoke scene came into being. Hüller had been searching through lists of “goodbye songs” when she came across the Harry Styles hit. The rest is movie history. Sure, “they told me that end is near/We gotta get away from here” is a little on the nose in a movie about Ryan Gosling searching for either a cure for Earth’s demise or an alternative place for humanity to call home. When you hear Eva warble that lyrical couplet, you still feel the stakes and the stark farewell to the last savior standing.
And then there’s Digger. Yes, Hüller is indeed in this satirical Tom Cruise lollapalooza, and given the impression she makes as Digger Rockwell’s sister Emma in the few scenes she gets, you wish our lady of perpetual anchoring was in it more. Hüller bursts in right around the 20-minute mark or so, screaming about how a disaster of her sibling’s making will totally ruin her business plans — and on the eve of Eva’s company going public, no less. There is no shortage of shrieking, bellowing, pontificating, grandstanding, or wailing in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s meta-message movie, but you’ve got to hand it to Hüller for breaking through the cacophony. Dressed in an open-collared button-up with an untied tie and looking like she just had a ring-a-ding-ding audition for the Rat Pack, she gives you a sharper portrait of the myopic self-involvement in five minutes than the rest of the film does in two-plus hours. At least one person understood the assignment.
The peripheral joy of watching her color in someone on the sidelines there is multiplied by seeing her in the spotlight in Fatherland, and a good example of how she’s become one of those international actors who now know no geographical, genre-based, or budget-specific boundaries. And she’s now set to end the year with another headspinning one-two punch. Rumors began circulating that Hüller had been tapped to shoot a cameo in Avengers: Doomsday as an unidentified character; The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that she will indeed enter the MCU via that blockbuster, for better or worse.
Before that, however, we’ll get to see her in Rose, Markus Schleinzer’s story of a 17th century soldier who becomes a farmer after fighting in the Thirty Years’ War. He will successfully make a home for himself, marry a landowner’s grown daughter, and become a father and an upstanding member of a pious Protestant community. The fact that the farmer is actually a woman named Rose, who’s been presenting as a man for decades, is unknown to everyone except, eventually, Rose’s wife. Although, because he’s played by Hüller, we the audience have a pretty good sense of how the gender lines are blurred here.
“Played” doesn’t feel like an adequate verb for what Hüller is doing in this extraordinary period piece (her second black-and-white one in a year). “Inhabited” feels more accurate. Not only is Hüller virtually unrecognizable under make-up that gives her character a massive facial scar, the result of catching a bullet in combat. She’s also giving you the sort of stoic male figure that would make Clint Eastwood nod approvingly. Rose earned Hüller the Best Leading Performance at the Berlin Film Festival for portrayal of this survivor, loosely based on numerous IRL genderfluid figures in European history, back in February. In a perfect world, she’d end her year the way she began it, with accolades and recognition for her work. But let’s be honest: Who needs a perfect world when you have one that allows an artist like Sandra Hüller to have this kind of career, and do this kind of work in such prominent films, given such prominent platforms? We consider ourselves lucky.
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