'Doctor' follows a doctor calling himself Helmut Gregor living in a South American village who, the audience discovers, is actually notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Its appropriate that The German Doctor, set in Patagonia in 1960, resembles a monster movie even though we encounter no ghouls or goblins. The monsters here are strictly of the human variety. Based on a novel by the films writer-director, Luca Puenzo, the film is a fictional imagining of how a German doctor, calling himself Helmut Gregor (lex Brendemhl), insinuates himself into the South American village where he has taken up residence. As becomes clear all too soon, the good doctor is Josef Mengele, the notorious perpetrator of hideous human experiments at Auschwitz.

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The village is peopled with blond, German-speaking residents; a local school has photos of alumni beside a Nazi flag; and mysterious hydroplanes are constantly landing and taking off from a nearby lake. The spacious hotel housing Mengele is run by Eva (Natalia Oreiro) and Enzo (Diego Peretti), whose 12-year-daughter, Lilith (Florencia Bado), is unusually diminutive for her age a source of fascination for Mengele, who convinces her reluctant parents to submit to genetic research, developed in his home-grown lab, to grow her bones.

Since the real-life Mengele, who fled to South America along with numerous other Nazi war criminals, was obsessed with eugenics, it makes sense that the Mengele of this film would be fixated on Lilith, whom he deems a perfect specimen. Because Lilith is constantly taunted by her schoolmates, she is flattered and excited by Mengeles promise to make her grow. Only Enzo seems suspicious of Mengele almost from the start. His growing horror at what is slowly unwinding matches our own, especially when Eva becomes pregnant with twins. Twins were another Mengele fixation.

For people whose movie memories of Mengele conjure up Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil, The German Doctor will probably seem old-fashioned and underplayed. Puenzo doesnt allow her actors, most notably Brendemhl, to go all histrionic on us which, of course, makes everything seem even scarier.

Within its straightforward limits, The German Doctor is highly effective, but it doesnt stray beyond those confines. It doesnt do more than sketch the network of collaborators and criminals in this creepy community or delve more than superficially into Mengeles life history. That the film doesnt attempt to provide a psychological analysis of him I find commendable. Some monsters, at least in the movies, are beyond analysis.

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'The German Doctor' is underplayed, which makes it even scarier