Samuel Goldwyn Get Dolled Up for Puenzo’s “The German Doctor”

Lucia Puenzo’s own second book to film adaptation (2009’s The Fish Child is the other) will hunt down U.S auds, as the Un Certain Regard selected Wakolda, which received a tepid response in Cannes has found a home beyond Argentina – and with the Samuel Goldwyn Films team as well. If you’re into Nazi’s reinventing themselves or better yet, remaining true to form, then be on the lookout for the now titled The German Doctor for the proposed spring 2014 release date.

Gist: Starring Alex Brendemuhl (Juan Carlos Medina’s Painless) as the notorious war criminal Josef Mengele, this is set in 1960’s Patagonia. A German physician meets an Argentinean family and follows them on the long desert road to Bariloche where Eva, Enzo and their three children are going to open a lodging house by the Nahuel Huapi lake. This model family reawakens his obsession with purity and perfection, in particular Lilith, a 12 year-old with a body too small for her age. Unaware of his true identity, they accept him as their first guest. They are all gradually won over by this charismatic man, by his elegant manners, his scientific knowledge and his money, until they discover they are living with one of the biggest criminals of all times.

Worth Noting: Lucia Puenzo might be known to cinephiles via the Cannes preemed XXY, but she is also the author of five novels.

Do We Care?: Our own Nicholas Bell covered the film in Cannes (✮✮ 1/2 out of 5), he suggests that “whereas her 2009 adaptation of The Fish Child unraveled itself with a series distracting narrative flourishes, her latest effort is a bit more reserved, a simple and straightforward tale that manages to build a sinister simmer, even distracting us from what audiences familiar with historical accuracy already know will happen.”