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Tag: Berlin Film Festival Reviews

  • ‘Wolfram’ Review: Warwick Thornton Deftly Reframes Painful Indigenous Australian Experience Through the Lens of Classic Western Archetypes

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    An experienced cinematographer before he turned to directing, Warwick Thornton has a feel for the Central Australian desert and the craggy MacDonnell Ranges that’s both epic and intimate. His refined sense of composition is directly informed by the landscape around Alice Springs where he grew up and his subcutaneous connection to it imbues his films with soulful beauty. Wolfram is no exception. A four-chapter saga of escape, pursuit and survival, the film, for all its brutality, ultimately becomes less a lament for stolen lands and stolen children than a stirring account of endurance.

    Family and community are the thematic foundation of this sequel of sorts to Thornton’s 2017 drama Sweet Country, again co-written by Steven McGregor and David Tranter. It picks up a few years after the events of the earlier film in and around the same fictional Northern Territory town of Henry, though all but two of the principal characters here are different. That gives the two movies the feel of a shared ancestral map, marked by overlaps and diverging tangents.

    Wolfram

    The Bottom Line

    Not without flaws, but equal parts haunting and healing.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
    Cast: Deborah Mailman, Erroll Shand, Joe Bird, Thomas M. Wright, Matt Nable, Pedrea Jackson, Eli Hart, Hazel May Jackson, Ferdinand Hoang, Jason Chong, Aiden Du Chiem, John Howard, Anni Finsterer, Luka May Glynn-Cole, Gibson John, Natassia Gorey-Furber
    Director: Warwick Thornton
    Screenwriters: Steven McGregor, David Tranter

    1 hour 42 minutes

    The nominal center this time is Pansy, played with an expressive gaze and few words by the invaluable Deborah Mailman, first seen clutching her newborn and hacking off locks of her hair with a rusty knife. With minimal preamble or exposition, Pansy and new partner Zhang (Jason Chong) set off on a horse and cart for Queensland, their last shot at finding her lost children. She beads the braids of hair with seeds, hanging them on shrubs to mark the way, like a trail of breadcrumbs.

    Meanwhile, Indigenous child laborers Max (Hazel May Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart) chip away at the walls of a tight mine shaft, removing chunks of the ore used to make wolfram (now more commonly known as tungsten) for their ill-tempered boss Billy (Matt Nable).

    A separate thread follows the arrival in Henry of criminals Casey (Erroll Shand) and Frank (Joe Bird), all mean attitude and swagger as they look to stake a claim in the area and prospect for gold. Ignoring the advice of the local storekeeper (John Howard) to avoid the back trails where they are likely to encounter “wild Blackfellas,” they head off in that direction. When they come upon young Max, left behind to keep an eye on Billy’s camp, Casey and Frank rob the camp and forcibly take the child with them.

    Once Kid discovers his sibling is gone, he steals a donkey from the mining site and goes after him, his exit timing helped by a convenient snake bite.

    Further off the dusty track on a run-down cattle station, belligerent drunk Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright) benefits from the virtual slave labor of his 18-year-old mixed-race son Philomac (Pedrea Jackson), the two main characters carried over from Sweet Country. (Philomac, then 14, was played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan.)

    When Casey and Frank roll up, they pretty much take over, claiming they found Max wandering alone. Kennedy is oddly deferential to the strangers as they start antagonizing Philomac, whose suspicions about them are confirmed when he talks to Max alone.

    Just as he did in Sweet Country, Thornton evokes the Old West-style lawlessness of the time and place, particularly as sneering villain Casey and cocky dope Frank go from vaguely menacing to outright ruthless. Their heartless treatment of Black petty thief Archie (Gibson John), another Sweet Country holdover, shocks Philomac into action as the movie shifts gears into a chase thriller. Blood is shed in killings both horrific and gratifying. In the latter case, Thornton reclaims the dignity of First Nations Australians with a rousing image of strength.

    Much of the story comes from oral history passed down by his great-grandfather to Tranter, whose family roots on both sides — Indigenous and Chinese — come into play. That said, the narrative feels a tad shapeless at times and the plot turns — one surprise revelation in Part Four aside — often familiar.

    The number of significant characters and story strands makes it a challenge for the director and writers to settle on a focus and maintain it until the threads are stitched together. But even when it ambles along rather than races, the movie’s heart and integrity keep Wolfram engrossing, buoyed by sterling work from the entire cast.

    Pedrea Jackson, sporting an excellent mustache, is a standout as Philomac, contemplative, observant, simmering with indignation and longing to be with his people; Shand makes Casey chillingly contemptible, treating the Aboriginal characters like animals; despite her role being largely symbolic, Mailman is enormously touching, her grace and quiet fortitude standing in for countless mothers whose children were taken from them; and the young actors playing Max and Kid are terrific.

    Two Chinese gold prospectors introduced toward the end, Shi (Ferdinand Hoang) and Jimmi (Aiden Du Chiem), indicate the sense of solidarity among victims of discrimination. They become a key part of an affecting conclusion, which maybe ties up the story too neatly, but few will be unmoved by seeing people so dehumanized by colonial rule show their resilience.

    Thornton once again serves as his own DP, drawing texture from the rich palette of reds, oranges, golds and browns in the sun-blasted landscape. The movie has no original score as such but makes distinctively atmospheric use of Charlie Barker’s saw playing. The director has still not surpassed the poetic simplicity of his lauded 2009 debut, Samson & Delilah. But Wolfram represents a very solid entry in his impressive body of work and a return to form after his more uneven last feature, The New Boy.

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    David Rooney

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  • ‘Rosebush Pruning’ Review: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning Serve up Shallowness With Style in Mixed-Bag Satire

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    The Pet Shop Boys’ synth-pop banger “Paninaro” is a tongue-in-cheek anthem to hedonistic Italian youth culture of the 1980s, its label-whore obsessions and its blithe superficiality. Fittingly, the song’s thumping beat is heard twice, real loud, in Rosebush Pruning, Karim Aїnouz’s high-gloss, pitch-dark satire about an American family described by one of its scions as mediocre, vapid egotists, who will never have to work thanks to a large inheritance. Fashion and techno music are the chief interests of the surviving members, one of whom dreams of Bottega Veneta loafers floating in the sky.

    The Taylor family left New York for the Catalonia coast six years earlier and have never quite managed to fit in, which is not surprising given the insular bubble of circle-jerk flattery that have built.

    Rosebush Pruning

    The Bottom Line

    Tart and amusing at times but leaves a sour taste.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
    Cast: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Elena Anaya, Tracy Letts, Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson
    Director: Karim Aїnouz
    Screenwriter: Efthimis Filippou, inspired by the film Fists in the Pocket, by Marco Bellocchio

    1 hour 35 minutes

    Their late mother (Pamela Anderson) was drawn to the region by her passion for the architecture of Antonio Gaudí, while her widower (Tracy Letts) and their four adult children, Ed (Callum Turner), Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell) and Robert (Lukas Gage), revere it as the birthplace of Cristóbal Balenciaga. The fact that the Spanish designer was actually from a town in the Basque Country on the opposite coast is likely part of the joke.

    Loosely inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut Fists in the Pocket, the scathing takedown of the bourgeoisie that put the Italian director on the map, Rosebush Pruning was penned by Efthimis Filippou. It has a close kinship with the deadpan absurdism of the Greek screenwriter’s collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos on The Lobster and especially Dogtooth.

    The peculiar energy, creepy sexual vibes and deliberate acid reflux of Aїnouz’s movie will make it an acquired taste. Or not. What it takes from Bellocchio is primarily the outline of a dysfunctional family of four siblings with a blind parent — in this case the father, not the mother — a young man prone to epileptic seizures and a multiple-murder plot that includes a fatal clifftop fall.

    The objective of the killings, in both cases, is to free the adored eldest brother to break away from the family’s incestuous grip and live with the woman he loves. In the new iteration that would be Jack and his girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning), whose introduction to the Taylors is one of many scenes played out with squirming discomfort.

    Given that he can’t see, the pervy father (neither parent is named) asks Anna to describe Martha for him, starting with her handbag — “Is it Bottega, or not?” he demands to know — and continuing with her breasts. Bristling with jealousy, Anna calls them “average, at best,” then proceeds to break down her outfit, judging the dress to be from a premium fast-fashion brand like Zara or Cos, and correctly identifying the luxury items of the handbag and a Cartier ring as gifts from Jack. No one mentions the term “gold-digger,” but they are all thinking it.

    Not even Ed’s bizarre “welcome to the family” spiel causes Martha to bolt. Hilariously, he reassures her that sadness and disappointment are only temporary by recounting his search for an impossible-to-find Comme des Garçons bag, which turned up online and was gone before he could iron out a credit card glitch. He wept for an entire day, but then scored an even better bag from Raf Simons, made of more luxurious leather. Turner manages to put across this supreme shallowness with total sincerity.

    (As a supremely shallow person who spends an inordinate amount of time and money scrolling through sites like Mr. Porter, SSENCE and Editorialist for luxury menswear markdowns, I have to confess I found this funny. Others might not.)

    One reason Martha isn’t put off is possibly that she’s not much different. While chafing at Jack’s hesitance to commit, she nods to the massive chunk of real estate porn with glorious sea views that they have just toured with the broker. “I’m sick of having to beg for basic things!” she huffs.

    Maybe this material — and certainly this knockout ensemble — could have delivered a movie with a less rarefied tone, if indeed the filmmakers were interested in that. But Rosebush Pruning is not funny enough to get away with its abrasiveness or make its unsympathetic characters palatable. The heady sensuality of Aїnouz’s best films (Invisible Life, Madame Satã) is somewhat smothered by the cold cerebral mischief of Filippou’s writing. It makes the movie seem counterfeit — way more Yorgos than Karim, but second-rate Yorgos.

    That’s not to say the film is ever dull. Ed likes to invent proverbs and sayings, and the title pertains to one of the more coherent of them — “People love roses. Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning.” The vicious means by which that pruning happens and the underlying abusive motivations for it provide intrigue. If you’re wondering why Mrs. Taylor’s teeth are so unnaturally white, don’t worry, a sicko explanation will be forthcoming, as will the nasty particulars of Mr. Taylor’s nightly tooth-brushing ritual.

    It’s a kick to watch Keough’s Anna in baby blue go-go boots get high on the sexual frisson between her and pretty much the entire family. She’s funny flirting with the politely distanced local butcher and complaining afterwards to Jack that he was hitting on her. Gage’s Robert is also no slouch in the come-on department, gushing over Jack’s appearance and enticing him by wearing women’s lingerie and doing you don’t want to know what else. (Marco Bellocchio certainly never had anyone chewing on his brother’s cumsock.)

    Bell and Turner expertly convey the charisma of Jack and Ed while also revealing that there’s something a little unsavory about them both. Ed is seen at intervals on a mic, practicing his imitation of Jack’s voice by repeating the words likely to be engraved on his tombstone: “Edward Taylor, 1991 to 2025.” Almost every bit of weird shit that happens foreshadows a later development. That includes the family’s monthly offering of a sheep carcass in the forest to keep the wolves that supposedly tore Mrs. Taylor apart from killing some other poor unfortunate.

    That’s one of many visually striking sequences shot by talented French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, its lush darkness contrasting with the dazzling color and light that fill the widescreen frame elsewhere. Matthew Herbert’s score is highly effective, notably in the first wolf scene, where it builds to a molto agitato orchestral hysteria. And Bina Daigeler’s costumes are a hoot, ostentatiously fashionable and expensive and sexy. (Gage scores the best fuckboy mesh shirt since Franz Rogowski in Passages.)

    The outcome of the family’s skulduggery, revealed over the end credits, should be a lip-smacking wicked delight. But there are too few grounding remnants of humanity in the characters to make us share in the shamelessly cynical pleasures of ruthless victory. There’s no shortage of stylish craft here and much to enjoy in the performances, but ultimately, Rosebush Pruning is too glib to work, leaving only an acrid aftertaste.

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    David Rooney

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  • ‘Only Rebels Win’ Review: Hiam Abbass Brings Her Trademark Elegance to a Familiar May-December Romance

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    For her latest drama Only Rebels Win, Lebanese-French writer-director Danielle Arbid (Simple Passion, Parisienne, A Lost Man) dusts off an old filmmaking technique, rear projection, in order to get around the fact that she couldn’t shoot in Beirut due to constant Israeli bombardment at the time of production. The workaround adds a subtle but striking artificiality to the proceedings, making this otherwise somewhat conventional story — about a 27-year-old South Sudanese-Chadian immigrant (Amine Benrachid) and a 63-year-old Palestinian woman (Hiam Abbass, best known Stateside for Succession but a near-ubiquitous presence in Middle Eastern cinema) falling in love — feel more experimental and edgier than it might have otherwise.

    Programmed to open Berlin’s Panorama section, this soft homage to local German hero Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, itself a homage to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, offers a workable blend of new and old, contemporary geopolitics and local socioeconomic tensions rubbing up against primordial, universal passions and follies. The mélange should play well for festival audiences but will have very modest theatrical prospects.

    Only Rebels Win

    The Bottom Line

    Convincing but conventional.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
    Cast: Hiam Abbass, Amine Benrachid, Shaden Fakih, Charbel Kamel, Alexandre Paulikevitch
    Director/screenwriter: Danielle Arbid

    1 hour 38 minutes

    For all its virtues, there’s something a little undercooked about Arbid’s screenplay, which doesn’t endow Benrachid’s strapping but enigmatic love interest Ousmane with anything like the dimensionality of Abbass’ heroine Suzanne. Indeed, most of the Lebanese characters here are more finely grained, even the minor ones who are meant to be bigoted straw men brought on to contrast with Suzanne’s natural generosity of spirit. Meanwhile, some of the more significant supporting players, such as Shaden Fakih as Suzanne’s permanently disgruntled daughter Sana and Alexandre Paulikevitch as complicated queer sex worker Layal, enrich the sense of texture with richly conceived characters that also upstage the less defined Ousmane.

    It all starts when Suzanne sees Ousmane being beaten up in the streets by men, he later tells her, who refused to pay him wages he was owed for manual labor or give him back his confiscated passport. A widow who lives alone in a spacious Beirut apartment block, Suzanne brings Ousmane back to her place to treat his wounds, and the two get to talking. She opens up about how she didn’t much love her late husband; he shares some details about his arduous journey from South Sudan.

    There’s clearly a spark there, and before long they’re dancing together, waving their arms about like a couple of 1960s hippies at a happening in the living room to a classic panty-loosener, Julio Iglesias’ ballad “Un jour tu ris, un jour tu pleures (No Soy De Aqui).” The transition to lovers is effortless.

    Given that Suzanne is embodied by Abbass, one of the most elegant actors of her generation and still a looker in her mid-60s, it’s entirely plausible that Ousmane is sincere when he praises her beauty. What a shame that Arbid undermines that by the last reels as Ousmane undergoes a substantial change in disposition, taking up drink — despite having first presented himself as a good abstemious Muslim — and generally turning to crime and licentious behavior. Presumably we are to infer that the stress of the societal disapproval he and Suzanne face as a couple once their relationship becomes known is to blame for his moral decay, but the motivations remain murky.

    The script is better on the bitchy, suffocating but often amusing world of neighborhood gossip as Suzanne gingerly makes her way around the racism of her friends and neighbors. Her two colleagues at the fabric store where she works, Lamia (Cynthia El Khazen) and Arsinee (Paula Sehnaoui), snipe and bitch about everyone like a couple of fishwives, so you can imagine the opprobrium that comes out when they learn Suzanne is seeing an African man.

    Arbid is persuasive about the casual racism and snobbery that’s marbled through Beirut culture for all its seeming sophistication, with Lebanese Arabs looking down on Palestinian immigrants, and most everyone prejudiced against darker-skinned newcomers. Sana, her brutish husband Toni (Ziad Jallad) and son Simon (Samir Hassoun) are just as bad. There’s a little oasis of tolerance at the local café run by Akram (George Sawaya), but even there snakes lurk in the tall grass. And the local priest, seemingly unfazed when Suzanne tells him she would like him to marry her to Ousmane, declines to help.

    The footage of Beirut streets, homes and cafes, shot specifically for this film, adds a distinct sense of place even as the obviousness of the rear projection creates a mood of heightened theatricality. The whole device makes this feel like a fable or passion play, a story as old as ancient tragedy and yet ineluctably contemporary.

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    Leslie Felperin

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  • ‘Brief History of a Family’ Review: Subtle Psychological Thriller Puts a Contemporary Chinese Family Under the Microscope

    ‘Brief History of a Family’ Review: Subtle Psychological Thriller Puts a Contemporary Chinese Family Under the Microscope

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    Identified only by their last name, Tu, the husband and wife in Brief History of a Family have built their comfortably middle-class life together in accordance with China’s one-child policy. Now, in less restrictive times, a chance to expand their nuclear unit arrives in the form of their teenage son’s mysterious new friend. From shifting perspectives, writer-director Lin Jianjie examines the contained volatility of this four-person configuration. His stylistic choices can be spot-on or self-conscious in their artifice, but his debut feature reveals a talent to watch. With its intriguing performances, narrative restraint and unanswered questions, the movie delivers a strong pull of yearning as well as tantalizing currents of suspicion and dread.

    The two boys are schoolmates who apparently have never interacted until the day Wei (Lin Muran) makes an overture of friendship that’s less innocent than it seems. The studious loner Shuo (Sun Xilun) becomes a regular guest at the Tus’ well-appointed high-rise apartment, igniting a simmering resentment in Wei and, in a low-key, nonsexual spin on Teorema, drawing out the parents’ unresolved emotions.

    Brief History of a Family

    The Bottom Line

    Strikingly enigmatic.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
    Cast: Zu Feng, Guo Keyu, Sun Xilun, Lin Muran
    Director-screenwriter: Lin Jianjie

    1 hour 40 minutes

    The father (Zu Feng) is a biologist, the mother (Guo Keyu) a former flight attendant, information we learn upon Shuo’s first visit: Taking in the view and the spaciousness and the elegant consumer trappings (fine work by production designer Xu Yao), he asks Wei, “What do your parents do?” In an incisive and humorous signal of the class divide between them, Shuo requests soy sauce at the dinner table and Wei’s mother, somewhat taken aback, offers him four types of the condiment. Having chosen, he douses his rice with it, his gastronomical gaucheness provoking a shocked silence.

    Another kind of silence greets Shuo’s disclosure that his mother died suddenly when he was 10. Bit by bit, bruise by bruise, he divulges that his father is a violent alcoholic. But Lin offers no glimpses of the boy’s home life, leaving us — and eventually one central character — to wonder if everything he says is true.

    The helmer keeps the story centered on the stylish space of the Tu apartment, which, after a crucial offscreen incident, becomes Shuo’s home too. But well before that turn of events, Shuo has insinuated himself into the family. Moving through their apartment’s hallway, past the feng shui fish tank, he’s no mere wanderer but, in his quiet way, purposeful. He hears Mrs. Tu’s meditation tapes in one room, Mr. Tu’s Bach in another, and Wei’s video games in the boy’s bedroom. The first time he spends the night, he has no qualms about asserting his preferences when Wei lends him clothes.

    In a late-night conversation with Wei’s mother, Shuo draws her out with an impressive off-the-cuff tenderness. Guo, who first made her mark onscreen as a teenager and for whom this film is a return to acting after a nearly 10-year break, offers a compelling portrait of gentleness, maternal warmth and regret. The heightened vision of her in the supermarket, not quite lost but incongruously fancied up, hints at some of the more surreal moments ahead from Lin and cinematographer Zhang Jiahao. Shooting in Chengdu, Hangzhou and Beijing, they create an unspecified city with an emphasis on its enormity, the edifices (and the produce displays) dwarfing the characters.

    Zu brings a colder form of constraint, with revealing cracks in the surface, to the role of Wei’s father, who’s impressed by Shuo’s focus and drive. The boy’s ambition is precisely what Mr. Tu longs for from his son, who’s ordinary in his insolent teenage laziness and more interested in fencing than the advanced English program his father insists he enroll in. Soon, Shuo is taking Wei’s place in the parents’ Ivy League dreams, and literally stands in for their son on a family weekend getaway.

    Bringing Shuo into their fold, the parents find themselves on newly unstable ground, unsettled but also renewed. For Mrs. Tu especially, Shuo represents a second shot at parenthood, a way of healing an emotional wound — a wound that can easily be torn open, as when another couple (Wang Shi and Zhu Zhu) announce that, in light of the reversal of longtime government policy, they’re expecting their second child.

    With minimal dialogue, the two young actors Sun and Lin evince a subtle reversal. Their unforced performances leave us to wonder, in Shuo’s watchful maneuvers and Wei’s increasingly stricken gaze, who’s helping whom, and who’s being honest — questions of identity mirrored in the reflective surfaces within the family home and their slightly confounding effect.

    The boys, in their adolescent confusion and awakening, waver between the impulse to save and the impulse to hurt. There’s an undertow of potential violence to the drama, percolating in its dark, propulsive score by Toke Brorson Odin (Winter Brothers), its suspenseful sound design by Margot Testemale and Jacques Pedersen, and the unrushed precision of Per K. Kirkegaard’s editing.

    There’s also a hallucinatory sensibility at times, and at others a scientific slant. Lin, who has a degree in bioinformatics, uses a circle motif that likens the four central characters to cells viewed on a microscope slide, and compares the coursing of blood through veins to people’s transit through city streets. Some of these visual gambits stop rather than deepen the story, but those pauses are momentary. If the biological metaphors don’t always click, the aching and perhaps dangerous dance among four wounded people never misses.

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    Sheri Linden

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  • ‘The Devil’s Bath’ Review: A Disturbing Psychodrama About a Woman Driven to Extremes in 18th-Century Rural Austria

    ‘The Devil’s Bath’ Review: A Disturbing Psychodrama About a Woman Driven to Extremes in 18th-Century Rural Austria

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    Austrian filmmaking duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala seemingly never met a remote woodland setting that didn’t feel like the right place to strand a traumatized woman. Following Goodnight Mommy (the chilling 2014 original, not the limp American remake) and their English language debut The Lodge, they inch away from horror without relinquishing the unsettling atmosphere or taste for the macabre in their intense character study, The Devil’s Bath (Des Teufels Bad). While it’s punishingly grim and has some pacing issues, this is a gripping psychological study by directors operating with formidable command.

    Early on, Franz and Fiala’s new film recalls Robert Eggers’ The Witch, despite being set more than a century later, in 1750. It has a comparable emphasis on ambience and authentic historical detail, which is possibly even more granular here. But vague suggestions of witchcraft quickly turn out to be misleading, with the story instead fueled by converging forces of religion, folklore and nature.

    The Devil’s Bath

    The Bottom Line

    Not horror but still plenty horrific.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
    Cast: Anja Plaschg, Maria Hofstatter, David Scheid, Natalija Baranova, Camilla Schielin, Lorenz Trobinger, Claudia Martini, Agnes Lampl, Lukas Walcher, Reinhold Felsinger
    Director-screenwriters: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

    2 hours 1 minute

    Produced by Ulrich Seidl, the film was acquired ahead of its Berlin competition premiere by Shudder for North America and other key territories and is slated for a summer release.

    The devil’s bath — no, it’s not that tub Barry Keoghan slurped from right after Jacob Elordi stepped out in Saltburn — was 18th-century vernacular for melancholia. Franz and Fiala build their film around historical research on the period, when chronic depression drove hundreds of people across Europe — predominantly women — to escape the hell of their daily lives by committing murder. That allowed them to repent and seek absolution in confession before they were executed, rather than face eternal damnation for the unpardonable sin of suicide. The phenomenon is sometimes referred to as suicide by proxy.

    Victims for the most part were children, prompted by the profoundly messed-up Catholic reasoning that their souls were still pure, so their killers were almost doing them a favor by sending them to heaven before they could sin.

    The writer-directors remove any doubt about where their story is headed by plastering a quote up front: “As my troubles left me weary of this life, it came to me to commit a murder.” An unsettling prologue shows one woman taking that desperate course of action with a baby at a waterfall in the rocky forests of Upper Austria, before walking through dense mist to the local authorities to declare: “I’ve committed a crime.”

    The lingering after-effects of that infanticide remain in plain sight as a gruesome warning when the deeply religious young protagonist, Agnes (Anja Plaschg), marries and moves to an austere stone cottage in the area.

    Clearly someone with a strong connection to nature, Agnes takes pleasure twisting twigs and leaves and berries into a wedding garland. But already at the exuberant village celebration, there are indications that her new husband, Wolf (David Scheid), might prefer the company of his drinking buddies. His disinterest in sex on their wedding night and thereafter makes her feel alone in her new home, her prayers to be blessed with a child going unanswered.

    Agnes’ unhappiness isn’t helped by the constant presence of Wolf’s overbearing mother (Maria Hofstatter), who criticizes almost everything her daughter-in-law does from the outset. That goes for her efforts to pitch in with the fishing haul, her organization of the kitchen or her habit of wandering off into the woods for hours instead of being at home to look after the goats and chickens and cook her husband’s dinner.

    When the sour crone spots a vase of foliage Agnes has gathered, she tells her: “Throw this rubbish out.” She has no use for anything that’s not strictly utilitarian, making Agnes seem ethereal and out of place as she arranges her collection of dead insects or turns her face toward a patch of sunlight as a butterfly alights on her skin.

    While she’s out in the woods Agnes is startled to find a grisly tableau with the corpse of the murderer from the prologue, seated in a chair, with most of her fingers and toes hacked off and her severed head sitting on a table alongside her. An illustration tacked to a tree describes the events that put her there. But as Agnes keeps returning to the site, her morbid fascination shows pity and perhaps a kind of kinship.

    Franz and Fiala never overplay the hardships of Agnes’ situation in her new home. They make Wolf a decent enough man, not without compassion, though perhaps unsuited for marriage, while Agnes is too much of a dreamer to pass muster with his hard-bitten mother. The old woman blames her daughter-in-law for her failure to conceive a child.

    But Agnes’ mental state steadily deteriorates as she realizes she’s destined to remain childless and virtually alone. She’s badly shaken by a tragedy in the village, and an attempt to run away and return to her family ends with Wolf dragging her back, screaming and hysterical. She takes to her bed and begins ingesting small doses of rat poison, physically weakening her and sending her mind on hallucinatory detours.

    The movie can be slow going; the buildup to Agnes’ final spiral feels protracted given that we know from the start some version of what’s coming, making the story drag a little around the midpoint. But the filmmakers harness the pathos of ordinary women imprisoned in soul-crushing lives as a timeless sorrow, and Plaschg is harrowingly effective at showing how Agnes keeps retreating deeper inside herself, pushing her to violence. Even with a preordained outcome, the dire means of her release from suffering are both shocking and heart-wrenching.

    In addition to playing the demanding lead role, onscreen for pretty much the entire two-hour duration, Plaschg composed the mournful score (she records as Soap&Skin), dominated by pensive strings that take on darker, more disturbing tones as the story progresses to its inexorable conclusion, its horrific impact heightened by the decision to skip right over any trial proceedings. The fast-tempo festive tunes for the wedding celebration are echoed in sickly fashion with the even more ebullient revelry sparked by Agnes being brought to justice.

    The barbaric behavior of onlookers at an execution is quite literally blood-curdling, but Franz and Fiala refuse to play even the most graphic elements as horror. They stick to a rigorous naturalistic style, weaving a remarkably vivid tapestry of 18th-century life in a rural peasant community — villagers picking up stones from the field, or lining up for a small blackened loaf of bread after their day’s work. The fishing scenes in a large mudbound pond are especially fascinating; the labor involved makes your back ache just watching.

    Unlike his orderly compositions for Goodnight Mommy, cinematographer Martin Gschlacht here adopts a less formal style that veers almost toward documentary. He brings somber earth tones to the low-light environments and the wintry locations, capturing the harshness of the land but also an occasional image of painterly beauty. The contributions of production designers Andreas Donhauser and Renate Martin and costumer Tanja Hausner are essential to the enveloping effect of this bleak but riveting drama about a little-known piece of history.

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    David Rooney

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