Oscar-winning Austrian director Stefan Ruzokwitzky rewinds the clock by a century for Hinterland, a visually striking period thriller set in Vienna at the start of the turbulent 1920s. The plot is superior pulp noir, and the characters mostly stock archetypes, but the film’s strongest selling point is its inspired CG production design. Shooting mostly against a blue screen backdrop, Ruzokwitzky creates a nightmarish Vienna of twisted buildings, forced perspectives and crazy-paving angles. This hallucinatory look draws heavily on Austrian and German Expressionist artists of the period: painters such as Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, plus revered film directors including Fritz Lang and FW Murnau.
Intended to mirror the PTSD of its battled-scarred, shell-shocked protagonist Peter Perg (Murathan Muslu), the film’s sense-warping aesthetic also serves as a metaphor for the revolutionary new artistic and political movements that shook 1920s Europe. Reminiscent of heavily stylized comic-book adaptations, most notably Zack Snyder’s 300 and the Robert Rodriguez-directed Sin City films, the cumulative effect of all this mind-bending visual distortion is certainly impressive, even if it sometimes distracts from the suspense-driven plot. Then again, given the retro setting, it makes sense that a little Brechtian alienation technique should be part of this knowingly nostalgic exercise in historical hindsight.
Ruzowitzky made his name in Germany with superior slasher movies before winning an Academy Award for his based-on-reality Holocaust drama The Counterfeiters (2007). His later English-language thrillers, Deadfall (2012) and Patient Zero (2018), were both unremarkable misfires. But he is back on firmer ground with Hinterland, which straddles the line between culturally rich homage and crowd-pleasing genre exercise. Following its prize-winning world premiere at Locarno film festival in August, the film opens on German and Austrian screens in October. A gripping thriller plot and innovative visuals should boost potential appeal to a wider global audiences.
A brooding anti-hero with a superhero physique and rock-star hair, Perg is an Austrian army officer returning to Vienna after fighting in World War I, which ended with his hellish internment in a Russian POW camp. Like Perg himself, the city has been shattered, drained and transformed forever by war. Formerly the seat of a vast empire, Vienna is now the shrunken capital of a newly established republic, a purgatorial metropolis awash with pimps, prostitutes and profiteers. And, as Perg soon discovers, with sadistic serial killers too.
Perg and his former army comrades left Austria as heroes but they return as mentally fragile husks, rejected by a nation eager to forget its rotten imperial past. The city is now a laboratory for all the virulent new ideas of the coming century: Bolshevik firebrands blocking streets, anarchists plotting in rowdy taverns, proto-feminists tentatively enjoying new-minted freedoms, and nascent Nazis muttering darkly about Jewish influence. Perg is one of the luckier veterans, reclaiming his old apartment from the crooked concierge who cynically assumed he was never returning. Even so, he remains bitterly estranged from his wife and daughter, assailed by feverish nightmares and post-traumatic flashbacks.
A series of gruesome murders draws a reluctant Perg back to his former job with the city’s police, lured by his slippery old friend and fellow detective Renner (Marc Limpach). The victims have all been tortured in grisly ways designed to inflict maximum pain: impaled on stakes, flayed with whips, gnawed by rats, body parts amputated and encased in ice. At times, Hinterland feels like a remake of Seven (1995) set in post-imperial Austria.
As sexual tension crackles with young forensic doctor Theresa Körner (Babylon Berlin star Liv Lisa Fries), Perg soon realizes that the murder victims are all fellow ex-POWs who are being punished for terrible moral dilemmas they faced in the camp, sacrificing a few lives to save thousands. Closing in on the killer, the hunter gets captured by the game, climaxing in a life-or-death showdown high above the city’s rooftops.
Hinterland has its flaws as serious drama: clunky plot mechanics, crudely emblematic characters, occasional lurches into lurid horror territory. But it also works just fine as a superior murder mystery full of arresting, imaginative visuals. Ruzowitzky has been pitching the film as a timely comment on toxic masculinity and the collapse of old patriarchal values. Arguably it has some multi-layered subtext, but it also scores highly on its own aesthetic merits as a stylish technical achievement. To quote one of early 20th century Vienna’s most famous citizens, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Screenplay: Robert Buchschwenter, Hanno Pinter, Stefan Ruzowitzky
Cast: Murathan Muslu, Max von der Groeben, Liv Lisa Fries, Marc Limpach, Matthias Schweighöfer, Margarethe Tiesel, Aaron Friesz, Maximillien Jadin, Stipe Ergec
Producers: Oliver Neumann, Sabine Moser, Bady Minck, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu
Cinematography: Benedict Neuenfels
Costume design: Uli Simon
Editing: Oliver Neumann
Music: Kyan Bayani
Production companies: FreibeuterFilm (Austria), Amour Fou (Luxembourg), Scope Pictures (Belgium), Lieblingsfilm (Germany)
World sales: Beta Cinema, Munich
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Piazza Grande)
In German
99 minutes
