Alois Lange

"But I have to say that he completely won me over, the unrelenting beauty of revenge, an entire life dedicated to avenging a humilliation, that's what we called perseverance...greatness even."

- Alois talking about Cheyenne's Father Alois Lange is the main and pivotal antagonist of the 2011 European drama film This Must Be the Place.

He was portrayed by german actor Heinz Lieven.

This must Be the place
Alois Lange doesn't appear until the end of the movie, but his actions during the Holocaust drive the story.

Cheyenne is a wealthy former rock star, now bored and jaded in his 20-year retirement in Dublin. He retired after two of his teenaged fans committed suicide. He travels to New York to reconcile with his estranged father during his final hours, only to arrive too late. The reason he gives for not communicating with his father for 30 years was that his father rejected him when he put on goth make-up at the age of 15. He reads his father's diary and learns about his father's persecution in Auschwitz at the hands of former SS officer Alois Lange. He visits a professional Nazi hunter named Mordecai Midler who tells him that Lange is small fry.

Cheyenne begins a journey across the United States to track down Lange. Cheyenne finds the wife of Lange, Lange's granddaughter and a businessman. He buys a large gun and eventually tracks down Alois Lange, hiding on Utah under the name Peter Smith, however he doens't find him in his household, but Mordecai Midler has tracked down Cheyenne and also Lange in Argentina, Midler decides to help Cheyenne and they both travel to a lonely moor in Argentina where they find Lange's hideout, there Cheyenne finds that Lange is now a very old blind man. Lange recounts the incident that led to Cheyenne's father's obsession with Lange, in which Lange threated Cheyenne's father with a german shepard and Cheyenne's father peed his pants from fear; Lange describes this as a "minor incident" in comparison to the true horrors of Auschwitz, but Lange mentions that he came to admire the man's single-minded determination to dedicate his life to making his own miserable. Cheyenne takes off his sunglasses and takes a photo of Lange and whispers that it was an injustice for his father to die before Lange did. Cheyenne forces the old man to walk out into the salt flats naked, like a Holocaustvictim; skin and bones and numb with fear. Cheyenne and Mordecai drive away soon afterwards, leaving him still standing in the flats.