The title of Pawel Pawlikowski’s extraordinary, compact drama Fatherland has a double meaning. In this somewhat fictionalized story of Thomas Mann’s brief 1949 visit to Germany, the Nobel Prize-winning author, after having lived in exile in California for 16 years, is challenged with finding his mooring in a country he can no longer call home; if it’s his fatherland, it long ago turned its back on him and his ideals. But fatherland can also be a state of mind where fathers live, a state both more specific and more elusive than fatherhood. In Pawlikowski’s telling of this portion of Mann’s story, it’s during this trip that Mann learns of the death of his son, Klaus—also a writer, though not as successful as his father—by suicide. If the elder Mann feels any emotion when he hears this news, it’s frozen inside him, a bubble of feeling isolated on its own ice floe. Fatherland, so secure in its rigid borders, is a cold, cold place.

Mann’s freedom from this interior island prison happens in the film’s last five minutes, a wordless reckoning that’s as quietly moving as anything you’ll see at the movies this year. But that moment wouldn’t hold so much power if Pawlikowski—with the help of his cowriter, Hendrik Handloegten—weren’t so skilled at sketching in the feathery details leading up to it. Pawlikowski is also the director of the 2013 Ida, as well 2018’s Cold War, pictures that, like this one, deftly balance postwar Eastern Bloc realities with the truth that all humans strive for connection and belonging. These aren’t dour movies, but serious, lustrous ones, less “political” pictures than movies about people trying to sort out what living really means.

At the beginning of Fatherland, no one—not even the aged Mann, played here in a quietly extraordinary performance by Hanns Zischler—has figured that out. The movie opens with a long-distance phone call: Mann’s semi-estranged son Klaus (August Diehl), living in Cannes and clearly in emotional distress, has reached out to his sister Erika—we’ll later realize it’s Sandra Hüller’s voice we hear on the other end of the line. Erika, an actress, writer, and onetime race-car driver, has become her father’s assistant, and she now urges Klaus to join her and their father on the trip they’re about to undertake, from California to the “new” barely postwar Germany. In the year of Goethe’s 200^th birthday, Mann will be accepting two awards, one in Frankfurt, in the West, the other in the East, in Weimar: his justification is that his literary idol was born in one city and died in the other, though it’s obvious that Goethe couldn’t have imagined that chasm that would open between the two within 200 years' time.

Both cities are in transition, and in crisis, though neither wants to admit as much. In Frankfurt, a gray city crumbling at the corners and still finding its footing after the war, though somehow doing its best to pretend all is well, Mann and Erika are greeted by the mayor and hustled off to a press conference. There, the esteemed man himself answers the respectful but probing questions of journalists. Once they learn that he’ll also be traveling to the East, it’s not lost on them that doing so could make him a target at home in the States, where anti-Communist storm clouds have long been gathering. And there are other, more spiritual questions for him to consider. An American journalist, a woman who, it turns out, is an old friend of Erika’s and possibly a former lover (she’s played by Anna Madeley), asks him where he feels his true home is, now that he’s an American citizen. His answer is courtly but honest. He may live in the United States, he says, “but where my Heimat is, my home, is a much more difficult question.” He’s a man between states, both literally and figuratively.

In Weimar, the chief way to welcome a returning hero is apparently to greet him with a somber folk song sung by a choir dressed in dark clothing; at one point, he’s serenaded by a group of children singing the then-newly pened East German national anthem. Mann accepts it all gracefully, but there’s also something a bit quizzical and lost in his expression. He’s jarred by one alarming moment: a wild-eyed man appears at the hotel suite where he and Erika are staying, begging him to reveal in his speech that the nearby former concentration camp Buchenwald is now being used as a detention center for political prisoners. The man is whisked way by officials before he can finish his spiel, though it’s doubtful any of it has swayed Mann at all. In both the East and West, when it’s time to address the audiences who have eagerly gathered to hear his thoughts, he gives heartfelt speeches, anchored in the legacy of Goethe, about the power of art to transform and sustain not just individuals, but whole nations. He seems to truly believe, as he says at one point, that art doesn’t recognize borders—or at least, he truly wants to believe it.

Through all of this, Hüller’s Erika serves her father dutifully. When necessary, she translates his responses to journalists into fluid French; she attends cocktail parties in his honor, even when it means suffering the indignity of running into an oily, traitorous, Nazi-loving ex-husband she’d rather forget forever; she drives her father through the countryside, and though we can’t see her face as she does so, we wonder if this particular task gives her some joy, given her car-racing past. But through it all, because Hüller is such a subtly expressive actor, almost gossamer in the ways she shifts moods, we see the ways in which her resentments toward her father can’t help simmering to the surface. When she learns of her beloved brother’s death, her composure doesn’t crumple visibly—only somehow we know her emotional reserves are folding in and flattening like a house of cards. And when she sees how little this event seems to trouble her father, she can barely go through the motions of helping him on his mission, which, as he seems to envision it, is to save his homeland with his lofty views on art.

How these two find their way back to one another, and to a place of acknowledged and shared grief, is a kind of unspoken miracle that unfolds in last 15 minutes or so of this elegant, remarkably economical movie. Artistically and emotionally, Fatherland accomplishes more in its 82-minute runtime than any two-hour-plus movie released this year. Cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who also shot Ida and Cold War, renders Fatherland in the same satiny black and white, as well as the same serenely squarish, or Academy, aspect ratio. Every frame is spare, elegant, intimate, and the film moves along so gracefully that you’re barely prepared for how exhilarating, and how quietly devastating, its final moment is. At one point, Hüller’s Erika tells her father that Klaus had once said he felt Bach made him feel life was worth living. Her father shrugs that information off, but the final moments of Fatherland—incorporating a serendipitous conjuring, like a specter, of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—bring it back to him. Can a person have more than one Heimat? Or can that place of spiritual belonging shift over time? Perhaps Bach had the answer. Perhaps he put it in a piece of music, for us to find when we most need it, in a church or even in a movie.

A pollster admitted this week to using fabricated data in its surveys that were picked up by leading publications across the U.S., claiming the stunt was an “experimental project” intended to showcase the “vulnerabilities” of the polling industry. The announcement has shaken trust in polling infrastructure ahead of the midterms, especially as some candidates say their campaigns were directly harmed by the fake numbers.

After election analysis website FiftyPlusOne submitted an inquiry to Wedgewood Polls regarding the authenticity of its data and methodologies, the pollster put out a statement across social media on Tuesday, saying it had been conducting a test to show "how easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?" In the statement, which has since been deleted, the group claimed it had been “far too easy” to distribute false data and insisted it "highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.”

Wedgewood's polls had been used by multiple national outlets for their midterm reporting, including the New York Times, Newsweek, MS NOW, and POLITICO. The Times, which cited around 15 Wedgewood polls between June and October, has since removed the data from its stories. In an accompanying editor’s note, the publication detailed its checking process for polls and said Wedgewood had answered several of their inquiries prior to the data being published, including questions on the identities of the group’s pollsters, the methods used to draw their samples, and the source of their funding.

TIME's email to Wedgewood Polls bounced back.

In another fraudulent polling operation uncovered in August, a company called Median Strategies fabricated polls for races in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California and similarly called the ploy a “social experiment” in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.

“It's very troubling that we've had two examples of this within a very short period of time during election campaigns, creating a lot of problems for legitimate polling,” says Michael Traugott, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Michigan, who previously served as president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).

Here’s what to know about the Wedgewood scandal, and what it says about polling ahead of the pivotal midterm elections. 

What do we know about Wedgewood Polls?

The polling group called itself a “fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans” in its statement. Its X account, which contained many of its polls, no longer exists.

G. Elliot Morris, a pollster and journalist who works at FiftyPlusOne, tells TIME that he and his colleagues had been suspicious about a “crop of new polling firms” that have emerged and released anonymous data. An individual eventually tipped off FiftyPlusOne to Wedgewood's polling, which was “the straw that broke the camel's back for us,” he says.

FiftyPlusOne said in a public statement that Wedgewood “operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm” by collecting money from donors to carry out crowd-funded polls and share its survey data.

The poll analysis group said Wedgewood disclosed two names in connection to the company: Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. According to FiftyPlusOne, Sims had prior experience in the polling industry. SoCal Strategies, another polling firm, this week acknowledged in an email to an NPR affiliate in Michigan that Sims had worked there, but is not currently employed by the company and “has not been for a year.”

“It is not atypical for a pollster to leave an existing firm, form their own, and self-fund some surveys to build reputation; we had no reason at the time to believe this case was any different,” FiftyPlusOne said regarding Sims. 

“This event does not help what is a decades-long trend of declining confidence in the polling industry,” Morris added, when asked about Sims’ involvement with Wedgewood. TIME has been unable to reach Sims for comment.

Senate candidate in Michigan says fake polling damaged her campaign

The polling scandal has sparked a flurry of reactions within the politics and government sector, with one former Senate hopeful claiming the numbers circulated by Wedgewood contributed to the collapse of her campaign.

Democratic Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow recalled how a poll from Wedgewood had shown her “plummeting into single digits.”

Wedgewood released polling on June 29 that placed McMorrow as having the support of only 9% of registered voters, leaving her trailing behind Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. Other polls also showed McMorrow in third place with single digits. A Susquehanna Polling survey conducted June 9 to 14 put McMorrow at 9%, although 49% of Democratic primary voters surveyed were undecided. A July 1 Quantus Insights poll put her at under 8%. McMorrow suspended her campaign on July 5, just one month before the primaries. 

In a statement posted to social media on Oct. 20, McMorrow said donations “dried up” and she was “hounded” with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the “infamous” Wedgewood poll numbers. 

Advising others not to trust the polls, McMorrow said she hoped Democrats are ready to “blow up the system with campaign finance and transparency reforms.”

Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist who ran a SuperPAC that supported McMorrow, claimed the fake poll had been “used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million.”

Amid widespread discussions over fabricated data, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr said, without naming any specific instance, that there has been a “significant surge” in fake polls and blamed news outlets for “amplifying or airing” them “without regard to basic journalistic ethics.” 

Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez quipped back and shifted the onus onto fraudulent pollsters themselves. 

“Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong,” she said in response to Carr. “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”

What impact can polls have on elections?

While documented fake polls are rare, according to experts, polling in general often plays a large role in shaping the narrative of hotly contested races.

Traugott tells TIME that polls can affect voting behavior and support for campaigns “because by and large, the average citizen is interested in backing the winner, and backing means not just votes; it also means financial contributions, contributing time and effort to the campaign, and the like.”

Research has demonstrated what is known as the “bandwagon effect,” in which voters become more likely to vote for candidates or issues that are more favored in polls. A 2023 study from the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties showed that polls discouraged support for less popular ballot items, or as the paper’s authors put it: “polls demobilize the minority and mobilize the majority.” 

It also found that moderate voters, who often represent a crucial demographic of voters and can swing tight elections, were the most impressionable when it comes to being influenced by polling. “Social conformity is strongest among ideological moderates,” the study said.

This effect has been documented going back decades. 

A 1996 experiment showed that participants who were shown a fabricated poll ahead of that year’s primary had a “significantly greater tendency” to vote for the candidates favored by the poll. 

This phenomenon has similarly been demonstrated in prediction markets, which have been shown to sway voters almost as much as polls. A study released on Oct. 20 by policy think-tank the Brennan Center showed that voters were 10% more likely to say that a candidate would win in an election if that person had higher odds of winning based on a prediction market. 

Likewise, voters were less likely to believe that a candidate would win if their odds were predicted to be lower. These prediction market odds, the study said, had a similar effect on perceived electability as traditional polls.

Traugott says that generally speaking, voters who identify with a specific party are unlikely to change their vote as a result of polling, but that they might not show up to the polls at all if they see their party’s nominee is disfavored to win. 

“It's often the case in the general election that the polls have an influence in terms of turnout,” he says. 

Should you trust polls?

Michael Dimock, the president of the Pew Research Center, says that in tight races, of which there are many in the upcoming midterms, “it's very easy for polls to ‘pick the wrong winner.’”

“I do think that people should be very cautious in over-interpreting pre-election polls' ability to project an election outcome, whether it's at a national level, state level, a district level, [or] local level,” he tells TIME. 

One of the main reasons for this, Dimock contends, is that even if participants in a survey say who they would vote for, they still might not show up to cast their ballot. He refers to this immeasurable but important factor as “enthusiasm differences.”

“What polls are really bad at capturing is who's going to actually show up and cast a ballot. It's really hard,” Dimock adds. “Human beings are bad at predicting their [own] future behaviors.”