Film review

  • Rose

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Markus Schleinzer (2026)

    Introducing Rose at the London Film Festival, Austrian writer-director Markus Schleinzer likened the title characters of this new film and his first feature, Michael (2011).  The latter is a modern-day sexual predator in urban Germany; he has abducted a ten-year-old boy, whom he keeps prisoner in his house and regularly abuses.  In Rose, set in the mid-seventeenth century, a woman who dresses as a man, returns to rural Germany after serving as a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War.  Rose successfully lays claim to a long-abandoned house and surrounding farmland, and lives there disguised as a man until circumstances conspire to reveal her sex.  Schleinzer said that he saw each of his protagonists as ‘an outsider’ in their time and place – which is putting it mildly.  The two stories have something else in common.  Like Michael, Rose is, in every sense, a serious film and, in several ways, an impressive one.

    The intro to its British premiere at BFI probably didn’t quite go according to plan, despite the best efforts of Leigh Singer, who handled things well.  He put good questions to Schleinzer and to Sandra Hüller, who plays Rose.  Before doing so, Singer had tactfully suggested that, because this mini-Q&A was happening pre- rather than post-screening, not too much could be said about Rose beforehand.  Reasonably enough, he didn’t count mentioning Rose’s dissimulation as a spoiler:  after all, the film has already attracted international attention (its world premiere was at this year’s Berlinale, where Hüller won the Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance).  But I don’t think Singer expected Markus Schleinzer to give away the film’s ending, as he promptly did.  Still, Schleinzer (who confessed to talking too much!) also supplied helpful background on Rose’s themes and development, as did Sandra Hüller.  Schleinzer wrote the piece originally as a novel (unpublished) that runs to around six hundred pages.  He distilled from that a screenplay that’s resulted in a film of only ninety-four minutes.  Hüller read the entire novel manuscript in preparing for the role.  Rose is a composite of many women of the period who, according to Schleinzer’s research, chose to live, and even fight in war, as men.

    Not too surprisingly, Leigh Singer commended Rose for raising issues-that-are-still-relevant-today – the dangers of groupthink, of not accepting people for who they really are, etc.  Schleinzer’s response to this was interesting.  He said he meant Rose’s experience and eventual fate to illustrate the importance of letting people live as they wish to live but that he was relatively less interested in the matter of gender identity.  Even so (and also unsurprisingly), there were notices outside NFT1 warning the audience that the film featured ‘transphobic attitudes’.  These notices didn’t just beg the question of Rose’s gender identity; they were, in retrospect, a bit misleading.  The film’s voiceover narration (read by Marisa Growaldt) refers to Rose always by that name and by female pronouns.  Although Rose certainly means the local community to assume she’s a man, we never know what male name she adopts.  As Rose gains respect as a landowner, she becomes known to those around her as ‘the master’.  These details are a significant illustration of Schleinzer’s priorities.  Rose is a feminist fable.

    The film’s closing stages include an interview between Rose and a judge (Sven-Eric Bechtolf), which is very well written and played.  Attitudes in evidence in Rose will, of course, seem benighted to a film festival audience in the 2020s, but it’s striking that, when the judge expresses the view that a person’s sex is determinative (a view many would now consider ‘transphobic’), Rose replies that she didn’t want to be a man but that wearing trousers allowed her more freedom.  An apt and witty way of putting it:  she presumably means physical freedom and freedom of action in society – only a man could have claimed that abandoned estate since women at the time weren’t legally entitled to own property independently.  (The house and land belonged formerly to a man whom Rose fought alongside in the Thirty Years’ War; when he was killed, she appropriated documents attesting ownership of the property.)  Once Rose has taken possession of the estate, she becomes a respected member of the community.  She works hard to rebuild the dilapidated farm, hiring male farmhands to help her, and paying them with her own funds.  She proves her courage when she shoots dead a marauding bear, thereby saving another villager’s life.

    Things start to get complicated when she wants to expand her property by purchasing a further tract of land from a locally prominent farmer (Godehard Gieser).  He’s unwilling to sell but offers Rose access rights to the land in contractual exchange for marrying the eldest of his five daughters, Suzanna (Caro Braun), and siring her children.  Suzanna, although sexually naïve, is upset that Rose doesn’t consummate their marriage; with Suzanna’s father more than displeased, Rose starts using a makeshift strap-on dildo to simulate sex.  When Suzanna becomes pregnant, she believes Rose to be the father.  She discovers her husband’s sex when Rose gets badly stung by bees, suffers anaphylactic shock and is subsequently confined to bed.  Suzanna and another young woman (Annika Molke) nurse the master, undressing Rose’s lower body to tend the bee stings.

    Sandra Hüller said that one of the character’s attractions for her was that Rose was a somewhat mysterious figure.  Fair enough, but once Rose crosses a line in taking a wife, Schleinzer’s storytelling is treading a fine line between mystery and evasion.  During the Q&A, Schleinzer suggested that some women of the era who disguised themselves as men were ‘probably lesbian’, but he didn’t seem particularly interested in Rose’s own sexual orientation.  It matters though.  Are we to infer that, if the farmer had agreed simply to sell his land to Rose, she would have continued to live alone and celibate?   If she was prepared to do that, can we really believe she would have risked her whole future in the community by marrying Suzanna?  Questions unanswered in Rose are left that way, I think, to make more salient the film’s feminist, anti-patriarchal thesis.  With no evidence that she’s unfaithful to Rose, one assumes Suzanna is pregnant because a male villager raped her.  When Rose eventually decides to open up about herself to Suzanna, they are seen but not heard talking; the voiceover narrator simply notes that the conversation was lengthy and sealed the bond of trust which has developed between the marriage partners.  It’s implied – though, again, unspoken – that Suzanna’s loyalty to Rose is an expression of not only sisterhood but also Suzanna’s dawning realisation that, if her present marriage is annulled, her father will force her into another.

    By the end of the film, both Suzanna and Rose have become mothers but won’t live to raise their children.  Suzanna’s readiness to keep Rose’s secret contrasts with the other woman who helped with the nursing.  In telling tales, she triggers Rose’s downfall.  Her womanhood is proved brutally.  Although Schleinzer doesn’t show the assault in graphic detail, her ambush by a bunch of locals leaves no room for doubt that Rose is raped.  A bailiff (Robert Gwisdek) is sent to the village to conduct investigations in the light of which Rose is tried and sentenced to death.  A stay of execution, to allow time for her to give birth, also gives Rose the chance to write down her life story, supposedly the source of the narration in the film, before she is beheaded.  Suzanna, found guilty of fraud and adultery, is condemned to death by drowning.

    Rose is the first of two Sandra Hüller films I’m seeing at this year’s London Film Festival (Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland will follow).  Although Rose is rather too opaque and symbolic a figure for my liking, Hüller’s portrait is further proof of her power and versatility.  Rose has a huge scar on one side of her face, where she took a bullet during her time as a soldier.  (She wears the bullet on a string round her neck.)  In the Q&A Hüller stressed that, despite the hours it took each day for the prosthetic to be applied, she found it very helpful as a means of feeling inside a character whose life is lived in a mask and under constraints.  For the most part, Rose speaks quietly and, for good reason, in a low key:  the stridency of Hüller’s occasional, furious outbursts has startling impact.  She graduates to freer tones of voice in Rose’s dialogue with the judge.  Undisguised in the condemned cell, she gives Rose a poignant calm dignity.  The cinematographer (as for Michael) is Gerald Kerkletz, whose black-and-white images strongly realise the austereness of Markus Schleinzer’s story and its setting.

    13 October 2026

     

  • Being Heumann

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Siân Heder (2026)

    The disability rights activist Judith Heumann featured prominently in James LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham’s fine documentary Crip Camp, which premiered at Sundance in 2020.  Sundance’s accessibility co-ordinator at the time, a friend of Siân Heder, encouraged her to turn Heumann’s life into dramatised film biography.  Heder sent a ‘cold’ email to Heumann, the response was warm and work on Being Heumann was soon underway.  This London Film Festival screening in the Royal Festival Hall marked the film’s British premiere; LFF director Kirsty Matheson welcomed to the stage Siân Heder, Ruth Madeley, who plays Judy Heumann, and Rob Delaney, who appears in a supporting role.  What Matheson, Heder and Delaney (though not Madeley) said by way of introduction are clues, I think, to why Being Heumann is so ropy.

    In spring 1977, twenty-nine-year-old Judy Heumann led a nearly month-long occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building.  What became known as the Section 504 Sit-In successfully pressured the new Carter administration into implementing the relevant section of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act[1].  As you’d expect, Heumann’s autobiography (Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist) covers the San Francisco sit-in, but it also describes her childhood, education and other early legal battles.  Siân Heder’s screen adaptation, which runs over two hours, is almost exclusively a reconstruction of the game-changing sit-in.  The screenplay, which Heder wrote with Rebekah Taussig, offers next to no insight into Heumann’s personality or the experiences that shaped it.  Since Crip Camp also included a good deal of newsreel footage of the 1977 sit-in, this new version of her story verges on redundant.

    As docudrama, Being Heumann is, for the most part, crudely tendentious – especially in its treatment of Joseph A Califano, recently appointed Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in Carter’s government.  Califano (Mark Ruffalo) is portrayed as the narrow-minded embodiment of resistance to Section 504’s implementation, and as a blustering buffoon, whose default mode of speech is shouting.  When Judy and other sit-in leaders take their case to Washington DC, leaving Kitty Cone (Madeline Delp) in charge back in San Francisco, they gather and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ outside Califano’s home, where he and his wife are asleep in bed.  Siân Heder tickles the audience by showing Califano, half-dressed, yelling outrage at the bedroom window then pratfalling, as he hastily tries to exit the house unseen next morning.  I qualified the first sentence of this paragraph because on the rare occasions that Califano is credited with a modicum of intelligence or integrity, Heder creates a bit of traction between his political position and Judy Heumann’s campaign – as when Califano is allowed briefly to explain how welfare reform tends to mean different things to different constituencies.  Once the campaigners have won the day – forcing his hand to sign into law the relevant regulations – Califano makes a phone call to Judy.  During a reasonable, good-humoured conversation, he tells her, ‘I’m not the villain here’.  She replies, ‘You are – well, every story needs one’.

    The remark reveals on Judy’s part a level of savvy self-awareness that Being Heumann nowhere else implies.  It made excellent tactical sense for Judy Heumann to turn Joe Califano into her campaign’s bogeyman.  It’s another thing entirely for Siân Heder to reduce him to a cartoon villain, particularly when she’s purporting to tell her story objectively rather than wholly from Judy’s point of view.  But then, Heder now appears to see herself as a campaigner – through movies.  Her first cinema feature, Tallulah (2016), didn’t have a disability theme, but she told the Festival Hall audience that, once she’d made CODA (2021), she received plenty of suggestions for what her next disability film should be – it seems any other kind of picture was out of the question.  CODA, far from subtle but highly engaging, deserved its success.  While the story was essentially formulaic, its domestic setting – a nuclear family comprising deaf parents, a deaf son and a hearing daughter – also made it distinctive, and the family relationships were well developed and played.  Heder’s latest is, in contrast, both shallow and vague.  She worked closely with Judy Heumann, until the latter’s death in March 2023, on developing Being Heumann for the screen.  She also assured Heumann that the film’s disabled characters would be played by actual disabled people and has proved as good as her word.  Heder gives the impression of being so convinced by her virtuous agenda that she ignored other elements needed to make a decent film.

    Several supporting characters undergo stupidly rapid transformations.  As the activists prepare to start their sit-in, Evan White (Dylan O’Brien), a San Francisco TV news reporter, buzzes around doing interviews with them.  To express himself, Hale Zukas (Andrew Pilkington), who suffers from severe cerebral palsy, uses a pointer attached to a head brace to tap out letters on a communication board and typewriter.  (Speech synthesiser technology, as used by, say, Stephen Hawking, was still a thing of the future.)  This is useless to the journalist, who hurriedly switches to another activist:  ‘At least that one could speak,’ he jokes nastily to his camera crew.  When White then follows Judy and her colleagues into the Federal Building and is nice as pie, I guessed he was up to no good, but it turns out he’s been instantly, entirely converted to the activists’ cause:  he remains a staunch ally for the rest of the film[2].  When the demonstrators gather outside their house, Joe Califano’s wife (Missy Yager) inanely suggests that if he ignores them, they’ll go away and he bellows a scornful reply.  A couple of lines and a brain transplant later, she says to him in a serious, thoughtful tone, ‘Maybe you should listen to them …’

    That’s to remind her husband how heartlessly pig-headed he’s being.  Judging from the audience noise, many people at this premiere loved the film’s scattershot mugging of Califano.  He must be a wrong ‘un; after all, he’s a middle-aged white man in a senior government position.  You’d never guess from the Being Heumann narrative that Joseph Califano, during his two-and-a-half years as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, ‘funded the nation’s first free standing hospice … and issued regulations to make Medicare reimbursement available for hospice care’ (Wikipedia).  You have to wait until postscript text on the screen, ahead of the closing credits, for Heder to acknowledge that serving in government isn’t always a bad thing:  Judy Heumann was Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services virtually throughout Bill Clinton’s two terms of office, and for most of Barack Obama’s, as his Special Advisor for International Disability Rights.

    Kitty Cone is another character quickly to change her tune.  Introduced to Judy, she’s demure and somewhat superior as she asserts her leftist credentials.  Plain-speaking Judy sees what Kitty’s wearing round her neck, and says drily, ‘I didn’t think socialists went in for pearls’.  This quite takes the wind out of Kitty’s sails – for about thirty seconds.  After that, she usually gives as good as she gets from Judy – just as well, given how badly Being Heumann needs a bit of tension among the sitters-in, and Heder’s sketchy picture of who the heroine is.  Kitty’s concluding (admiring) description of Judy as ‘the asshole we needed’ is a rare line that punches through.  The dialogue is sometimes amazingly sloppy.  When she learns that Judy is on hunger strike, Kitty observes, ‘So she’s Gandhi now?’  Not much later, news of the hunger strike is relayed to Joe Califano in Washington.  ‘Does she think she’s Gandhi?’ he says – or, rather, shouts.  That’s the only difference from Kitty’s reaction, and the joke wasn’t brilliant the first time.

    From Siân Heder’s point of view, Ruth Madeley must have been a close-to-ideal candidate to play the lead, even though she’s ten or so years older than Judy Heumann was in the mid-1970s.  Heumann became quadriplegic after contracting polio in infancy.  Born with spina bifida, Madeley is an ambulatory wheelchair user.  She was a disability campaigner well before she was an actor and has been both for some time now.  Unlike Heumann, though, she’s neither American nor Jewish.  Asked by Kirsty Matheson how she prepared for the role, Madeley talked likeably about the challenge of playing an icon, concealing her own Lancashire accent and learning a Brooklyn one instead.  She gives a creditably committed but unvarying performance.  The script’s defects are the main reason for that although Ruth Madeley has perhaps also confused single-mindedness with sameness.  The lack of variety matters more because Judy so dominates the film’s action.

    Badly miscast and awkward in Poor Things (2023) and Mickey 17 (2025), Mark Ruffalo would probably have made a much better job of Joe Califano if Heder had given him a chance.  No one else in the non-disabled cast registers much at all.  That includes Rob Delaney, even though his role as a sympathetic politician is remarkable in the overall set-up.  Delaney told the Festival Hall audience that he prepared to play Congressman George Miller by thinking of ‘my own disabled friends and how they enrich my life’.  I wondered how that was an aid to characterisation but realise now I was missing the point, according to how the people involved in Being Heumann see their movie.  Just as it would be missing the point to comment on the acting quality of the disabled cast members other than Ruth Madeley:  they’re irreproachable because of their disabilities (regardless of what the specific disability may be and how much it might affect, for example, reading lines).

    There are a few powerful images.  Judy in her wheelchair at the start, battling through heavy New York traffic and giving the finger to drivers hooting at her.  Judy gazing up at the many steps of the Capitol in Washington, at the other end of the film.  A group of activists using their wheelchairs as a battering ram to break through a government building entrance.  But even the images are of subsidiary importance here:  Siân Heder and her colleagues clearly take the view that they were engaged in a mission that transcends mere dramatic cinema – and the Director of the London Film Festival agrees with them.  Kirsty Matheson instructed us to ‘go out into the world’ to tell others about the ‘inspiring people’ we’d seen on the screen.  You might well feel like doing that after watching Crip Camp.  By the end of Being Heumann, I’m afraid to say I was anxious to go out into the world just to get away from a duff film.

    12 October 2026

    [1] Section 504 of the Act provides that ‘No otherwise qualified individual with handicaps in the United States . . . shall, solely by reason of her or his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance….’

    [2] On the evidence of Crip Camp, the benighted version of Evan White in Being Heumann, transient as it is, is a travesty.

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