Russell Crowe Confronts History as Hermann Göring in Stark ‘Nuremberg' Teaser Trailer
You don't cast Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring unless you're chasing a specific kind of gravity. Sony Pictures Classics just released the Nuremberg teaser trailer—a tight, unnerving minute of brooding atmosphere, fractured psyches, and the eerie calm before judicial thunder. It's not here to entertain. It's here to unnerve.
James Vanderbilt, screenwriter behind Zodiac and Truth, returns to the director's chair with only his second feature. This one—based on Jack El-Hai's non-fiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist—is a courtroom drama on paper, but if the trailer's any indication, it plays more like psychological warfare in a post-war mausoleum.
The film premieres at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival this September, with a theatrical release set for November 7, 2025. And if this teaser does anything right—and it does—it's establishing dread. Vintage courtroom sketches are cross-cut with flickers of interrogation rooms and corridors echoing with the ghosts of a regime. There's no grand score. No swelling strings. Just cold steel and tighter framing.
What the Teaser Reveals (and Smartly Withholds)
In less than a minute, we're introduced to Rami Malek's Douglas Kelley, the U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to assess Nazi war criminals' mental fitness before trial. His real adversary isn't legal—it's psychological. And Russell Crowe's Göring, seated and smirking behind a glass partition, makes it abundantly clear: this will be a two-man chess match, played over the ruins of Western morality.
Crowe, aged and powdered, doesn't just imitate Göring—he looms. The teaser is sparse on dialogue, but one line cuts through: “You want to know why it happened here? Because people let it happen.” It's a sentiment that lands less like a question and more like a warning. The way it's delivered? Icy, practiced. Possibly manipulative.
The Cast and the Stakes
Michael Shannon steps in as Robert H. Jackson, the lead prosecutor. A good casting fit—Shannon thrives in roles where righteousness simmers just under the skin. The ensemble includes Leo Woodall, Richard E. Grant, John Slattery, Colin Hanks, Lydia Peckham, and Wrenn Schmidt—actors capable of inhabiting the gray zones this story promises.
But make no mistake: this is a Crowe-Malek faceoff. The trailer leans hard into the idea of psychological erosion—Kelley, pulled deeper into Göring's philosophical net, trying to find where madness ends and ideology begins. It's about the performance of sanity in the aftermath of genocide.
Production Intent and Visual Language
Visually, the teaser goes for desaturation over spectacle. Stark greys, clinical lighting, and suffocating architecture dominate. Cinematographer Damián García (Narcos: Mexico, The Wild Ones) seems to be using tight interiors and symmetrical framing to box characters in, visually echoing moral confinement. It's prestige filmmaking, sure—but without the soft edges studios often use to dull the horror.
This isn't Schindler's List retread territory. There's no sentimentality here. If anything, Nuremberg is reaching back to Zodiac's cold proceduralism and layering it with The Silence of the Lambs's psychological cat-and-mouse. The question Vanderbilt seems to be posing is: how do you put evil on trial when it knows how to perform innocence?
Industry Angle
Launching at TIFF 2025 positions Nuremberg right where it wants to be—Oscar-adjacent, but with enough time to build momentum before theatrical release. Sony Pictures Classics is smartly leaning into the gravitas of its cast and source material, likely banking on awards buzz to elevate box office numbers. Crowe's last major prestige vehicle was The Loudest Voice, and this feels like a similarly dense, actor-driven showcase.
It also taps into a rising trend: revisiting WWII not through combat or spectacle, but through postwar reckoning. First The Zone of Interest, now this. Audiences aren't being shown how the war was won—but how it was processed, buried, and judged. And maybe, how its ghosts never left.
Final Thoughts
The Nuremberg teaser doesn't overplay its hand. It doesn't need to. It sells the tone, stakes, and central conflict in under a minute without a single courtroom speech or monologue montage. Crowe looks terrifying in his restraint. Malek seems genuinely haunted. And Vanderbilt appears ready to confront what most films only gesture toward: the banality of evil, inside the cold geometry of justice.
Let's hope the final film holds that line.
Watch the official teaser trailer here. And let us know—do trailers like this still move the needle for you, or is historical drama fatigue real?
