If period filmmaking’s credibility can be measured by the audience’s ability to imagine said person scrolling on an iPhone, Markus Schleinzer deserves recognition for his contributions to the genre. The Austrian director’s latest, a macabre, pseudo-folktale titled Rose, is set in 17th-century Germany. It’s a period to which Schleinzer travels with ease: after some introductory narration (read with dubious cheer by Marisa Growaldt), we meet Sandra Hüller’s eponymous war veteran—a woman who’s been presenting as a man for years (“There is more freedom in trousers”, she later explains)—just as she encounters a group of villagers near the plot of land she’s come to falsely claim. It’s nighttime, and the scene is lit by torch fire—all the better to show the asymmetries of the faces and establish the textures and potential threats of Rose’s world. It feels like something from another era.
Watching it at the Berlinale last weekend, my mind wandered to everything from Radu Jude’s Aferim! to Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God—both in terms of tone (a kind of detached irony that eventually gives way to something fundamental and profound) but also in how so many of its monochrome vistas (the DP is Gerald Kerkletz, who find beauty in the granular details) could easily pass for charcoal paintings. Rose is Schleinzer’s third feature, after Michael (2011) and Angelo (2018), but he began his career as a casting director for filmmakers like Jessica Hausner, Michel Haneke, and Ulrich Seidl. Of those early collaborators, Schleinzer’s acclaimed debut (which told the story of a seemingly normal guy who turned out to have a boy locked in his basement) probably skewed closest to Seidl, but Haneke seems the more accurate comp this time around—particularly The White Ribbon, another film that skewered the patriarchal Christian belief systems upon which much of this part of the world was built.
Partially inspired by the 16th-century peasant imposter Martin Guerre, the story follows Hüller’s gender-bending antihero (who still sports a gnarly scar on her right cheek from an encounter with a bullet in the Thirty Years War) as she stealthily integrates herself into a community devoted to god and stoicism. Buoyed by some early successes (in one of Schleinzer’s best sequences, she wins the trust of her neighbors by miraculously felling a bear), she soon tempts fate by agreeing to marry a wealthy landowner’s daughter: a girl named Suzanna (a great performance by Caro Braun) whose apparently pliable and devout nature appears to present little threat; but who becomes something of a spark plug once a baby is miraculously conceived. Schleinzer’s film then veers in the direction you expect, though never quite in the manner you expect it to.
Needless to say, Hüller is magnificent in a role that relies heavily on her abilities as a physical performer. Schleinzer is, naturally, not in the business of cheap sentiment, but when something vaguely resembling happiness presents itself in the story, the restraint with which Hüller allows Rose’s heart to thaw is still remarkable. The movie builds to a final stretch comprising narratively economical, delicately composed and quietly devastating vignettes, during which both Schleinzer and Hüller fully rise to the occasion. After what was basically a three-year sabbatical since The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, Rose has set a high standard for what is already lining up to be another landmark run for the actress with Project Hail Mary, Iñárritu’s Digger, and Pawel Pawlikowski’s 1949 all likely to be with us in the next 12 months or so. Whether or not those films will eventually outshine it or bring it more into the conversation, Rose is anything but a minor addition to the actress’ ouevre.
Rose premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.