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 the (self-confessedly) loquacious Markus Schleinzer to give away the film’s ending, as he promptly did. Still, Schleinzer also supplied more 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 Schleinzer wrote the piece originally as a novel (unpublished) that runs to around six hundred pages.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 we were in for a film that featured ‘transphobic attitudes’. These notices didn’t just beg the question of Rose’s gender identity; they were, in retrospect, a bit misleading too. 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 tract.
The film’s closing stages include an interview between Rose and a judge (Sven-Eric Bechtolf), which is very well written and played. The attitudes illustrated 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, which occasionally verges on confusion. 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. 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 that Rose would have gambled her 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, caused by a bullet during her time as a soldier. In the Q&A Hüller explained that it took hours each day for the prosthetic to be applied but also how helpful she found it as a way of feeling inside a character who wears a constraining mask. 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, Sandra Hüller makes Rose’s final sad dignity poignant. The cinematographer (as he was for Michael) is Gerald Kerkletz. The austere nature of Markus Schleinzer’s story and its historical setting is strongly realised in Kerkletz’s black-and-white images.
13 October 2026
