A handsomely upholstered psychological thriller with more than a little contemporary resonance, the period drama “I Is Another” should spark heated debate about what constitutes a historical fact as well as the increasingly malleable nature of truth today. German writer-director Felix Randau’s fourth feature centers on the fascinating but now mostly forgotten figure of Felix Kersten (1898–1960), a Baltic German massage therapist to SS Reich leader Heinrich Himmler. Played with unctuous authority by the multilingual Danish performer Claes Bang, Kersten claims to have used his influence to obtain the freedom of thousands of concentration camp prisoners, and is obsessed with winning a Nobel Prize. While trying to further propagate his version of history, Kersten meets his match in the fictional journalist Hedda Wohmann (excellent Austrian thesp Valerie Pachner), who questions his self-proclaimed heroism.
Intimately shot by Austrian DP Sebastian Thaler, the tightly framed action starts on a night train slowly wending its way from Stockholm to Oslo in the autumn of 1952, where the Nobel Committee is due to reveal the winner of its Peace Prize. After ambushing Nobel hopeful Kersten onboard, Wohmann makes multiple attempts to interview him. He, meanwhile, is helpfully carrying notes for his autobiography and official-looking documents to support his story.
The tense encounters between the rhetorically agile Kersten, who demands to be addressed formally as Medical Councilor Kersten, and the stubborn Wohmann thrill as their verbal jousting and cutthroat one-upmanship soon reveal that Wohmann, too, carries a hidden agenda. While Kersten taps his Swedish security connections for information about Wohmann, the intrepid journalist relies on chutzpah and archival detective work.
As befits his character, Bang plays Kersten as a smart, confident fabulist who lives performatively and is the hero of every story he tells. From his immaculate suits and starched white shirts to his sotto voce asides about his rules for marriage, he is a self-created character whose intent is to charm Wohmann into seeing things his way and printing the legend. But his handsome brow occasionally furrows with irritation when she introduces an inconvenient fact. Pachner proves a worthy opponent as the reporter who hopes she can recoup her lost career standing with a scoop about Kersten. With her feline good looks and refusal to be intimidated when he confronts her with past mistakes, she holds her ground, eyes glittering.
Both Kersten and Wohmann are travelling with their respective spouses, Irmgard and Winfried (Susanne Wuest and Timocin Ziegler), whose strained silences and sudden revelations reveal volumes about life with their more difficult partners. Randau cleverly uses different visuals to show Kersten and his wife’s description of the same incident. Meanwhile, Winfried’s painful account of his time as a soldier, seemingly never before shared with his wife, makes both her and the audience re-evaluate firm notions about good and evil, and what an ordinary man might do to survive an extraordinary situation.
In contrast to the tight spaces of the train, where reflections in mirrors and glass also contribute to the theme that every person contains multitudes, the flashbacks to Kersten’s relationship with Himmler (Martin Müller) during the war years are also claustrophobically visualized, with the suffocating feeling coming more from his close contact with the SS. In Kersten’s telling, he is always a central player, suggesting, indeed insisting on his ideas to the German commander. He claims credit for bringing Himmler together with Norbert Masur from the Swedish branch of the World Jewish Congress in the final months of the war and places himself in the room where it happened, making important contributions to the discussion.
Before starting this project, writer-director Randau was approached by French producers who were developing a miniseries on Kersten depicting him as a true hero. But when Randau started his own research, he discovered that Kersten was not the great savior he claimed himself to be, but someone trying to rehabilitate his past because of his ambition to win the Nobel prize. Interestingly, Randau is not the only filmmaker to explore Kersten’s murky background and questionable claims. Finnish helmer Arto Koskinen made a similar deep dive which he transformed into the documentary “Who was Felix Kersten?” (1998) and a 12-episode podcast (2019).
As Wohmann leads Kersten through the twists and turns of his personal history, “I Is Another” benefits from top-notch tech credits, creating a convincing and attractive period look. Kudos are due to Stephan von Tresckow’s production design and Mara Helml’s covetable costumes. Bernhard Fleischmann’s well-used score and Joana Scrinzi’s precise cutting add tension and pace.
