Movies and TV shows have played a pivotal role in keeping the stories of the Holocaust alive. After all, the 1978 TV series Holocaust popularized the term to describe the attempted genocide of the Jews. No other mass extermination has received such intricate exploration through storytelling, but its aftermath looms just as large. 

Over the decades, there have been a number of features and shows about the Nuremberg trials, the dramatic international tribunal that charged surviving Nazi leadership with humanitarian crimes in 1945. While 1961’s epic courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg looms large, it was preceded by the 1947 documentary The Nuremberg Trials. Alec Baldwin starred in the miniseries Nuremberg in 2000. Non-fiction accounts of the trials have aired on the BBC, the History Channel, and Netflix. What more is left to explore?

The new drama Nuremberg has the answer. Adapted from the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, writer-director James Vanderbilt’s engrossing story follows the plight of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), who gets tasked with determining whether the chief Nazi officials captured at the end of WWII are fit to stand trial. 

In the process, he develops a complex relationship with the scheming Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command. An idealistic medical professional with a penchant for magic tricks, Malek’s interpretation of Kelley finds him initially open to the possibility of Göring’s innocence – or at least that he might not have known the full extent of the Nazi party’s crimes. 

Kelley’s gradual realization of the naivete necessary to maintain that delusion is unique in the history of Holocaust cinema. The movie has the brisk pace of a blockbuster thriller as it builds toward the trial, with a stern Michael Shannon delivering the moral centerpiece of the story as U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson. Vanderbilt follows a traditional playbook of dramatic confrontations, thundering music cues, and stagy monologues, but there’s a keen self-awareness hovering around these scenes, as if they exist in air quotes. 

That’s because Kelley isn’t quite sure what to believe, especially once he befriends Göring’s wife and child. Kelley’s initial insistence that Göring might be innocent demonstrates the fundamental challenge of recognizing irredeemable hatred in a genuine human context. No matter the artificial nature of its pacing, Nuremberg has much to say about the real world, then and now.

Crowe’s Göring – one of his best performances in years – adds to Kelley’s confusion. Slick and diplomatic about how he chooses to express himself, the man plays off his interlocutor with a skill that would make Hannibal Lecter red with envy. You don’t need a degree in WWII history to know that Göring’s full of it, but as Kelley’s own story hasn’t been told this way before, Nuremberg generates its central intrigue from the question of how, or even when, the doctor will realize what we already know. And when that moment comes, it’s a powerful gutpunch.

Some of the most celebrated depictions of the Holocaust demonstrate the clarity of a moral compass. Schindler’s List resonates because its central character develops a clear sense of right and wrong by virtue of what he perceives around him. Kelley, however, stumbles into a Nazi trap well after the liberation of the concentration camps, which is what gives the movie its contemporary significance.

Rather than watering down its subject, Nuremberg transports it into a lively, commercial style. That might strike some audiences as too reductive, but considering that these atrocities continue to recede into the history books, any story capable of giving them renewed immediacy is more than welcome. It’s easy to understand what pure evil looks like until you’re staring it in the face, and it looks like just another person.

This article originally appeared in The Playhouse Post. Subscribe here.