A heartrending, austere portrait of a physically and spiritually scarred woman returning to her postwar hometown in the 1600s, posing as a male soldier.
Not an image is wasted. Not a single line of dialogue feels unnecessary, or a subplot tangential… Watching Hüller, already a master of submerged heartbreak in so many previous parts, we might begin to suspect that we’re witnessing her greatest role yet.
Rose 2026
Horror is central in the tragic life of Rose (a transcendent Sandra Hüller), victim of a harrowing childhood and innumerable atrocities on the battlefields of the Thirty Years War, leaving her face disfigured from a bullet-wound. From an early age, she noticed the freedom a pair of trousers would afford her, and has since spent her life posing as a man. With the war over, Rose travels to a remote German Protestant village, laying a dubious familial claim to a dilapidated stretch of farmland. Rose’s life is one of fabrications, careful deceptions, a delicate ecosystem of repression which begins to unravel when she is betrothed to a local’s daughter.
Cruelty and brutality are everywhere in Markus Schleinzer’s transfixing new film, but rarely shown on screen. Shot in rapturous black and white, it is a tough, Bergmanesque tragedy, shot through with a staggering humanism that flows from Hüller, who has quickly emerged as one of the most significant performers of our time. It is not strictly a film about the transgender experience, but one about the terrible restraints we put on oppressed classes and the sacrifices they must make in order to live truthfully.
– Tom Augustine