Is the world ready for the first blockbuster Covid documentary? Shot with forensic precision and chilly formal beauty by feted Austrian non-fiction auteur Nikloas Geyrhalter, The Standstill charts the wide-ranging impact of the Coronavirus shutdowns that turned Vienna into a ghost town for much of 2020 and 2021, a situation mirrored in cities across the world. Most of us have probably endured more than enough gloomy plague reportage in recent years, but sufficient time has now passed since the pandemic peak for a more measured historical overview, especially one shot in Geyrhalter’s signature painterly style of elegantly wordless tableaux, here punctuated by concise interview clips. This is real-life slow-motion disaster movie on an epic scale, a panoramic city symphony filled with sumptuous urban vistas and rich human detail. World premiering in DOK Leipzig festival this week, it should travel widely based on its universally relatable theme, plus the director’s strong track record of prize-winning films including Pripyat (1999), Our Daily Bread (2005) and Over the Years (2015).
Geyhalter and his small team began collecting material for The Standstill in early 2020, just weeks into the first Covid lockdown. The director’s initial impulse, he explains in his DOK Leipzig press notes, was to document this once-in-century event for the archives long before he knew how the virus would impact on the future of humankind. Over two years, he amassed a huge mass of material, then imposed a loose narrative shape afterwards, partly though recurring interviews with schoolteachers, politicians, health workers, cinema managers and others. Some become steadily more hopeless as each new viral wave arrives, others see the pandemic as a potential invitation for humankind to slow down, re-examine our values and remake a better world.
There is tragedy here, of course. Hospital patients struggle with potentially lethal lung damage. Grieving loved ones barred from the funerals of dead relatives, whose coffins arrive inside anonymous trucks for cremation in chillingly empty industrial facilities. But there is compassion, solidarity and ingenuity too. Amateur musicians stage free concerts on apartment balconies, clergymen hold church services over Zoom, masked frontline workers bravely risk their own lives to help their fellow citizens. In counterpoint to all these stressed teachers and medical experts, Geyhalter also shoots the angry masses who attended various anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine protest marches in central Vienna across 2021. His highly visible elevated camera set-up drew hostile responses from the crowd, though he does not include that here, coolly observing with no obvious editorial spin.
The Standstill is a deluxe showreel of Geyrhalter’s immersive, hypnotic, oddly soothing observational style: strikingly geometric compositions, typically framed in static long shots from a raised angle, with prominent use of symmetry and plunging perspective. Even without the Covid context, this widescreen urban mosaic is awash with post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller imagery: a sea of grounded airliners crowding the runway at Vienna airport, deserted subway stations that resembled futuristic Stanley Kubrick backdrops, eerily empty overflow hospital wards inside grand exhibition halls. The director also makes striking use of those split-screen video platforms that flourished during the pandemic, incorporating clips of online lessons at his teenage son’s school, and elegant travelling shots that glide through a depopulated Vienna in the depths of lockdown. The city’s iconic Prater amusement park, as seen in The Third Man (1949) and many other films, becomes a haunted horror movie set without customers.
Like the pandemic itself, The Standstill drags on a little too long as it lurches between terror and tedium, existential despair and mundane self-care, full lockdown hibernation and resurgent masked gatherings. The final act also feels a little flat and disjointed, ending abruptly with the World Health Organisation’s May 2023 declaration that Coronavirus is no longer a global emergency. There is no satisfying sense of closure here, perhaps because the virus is still with us, the final reckoning still not entirely clear. But these are minor wobbles in an otherwise absorbing, exhaustive and often disturbingly beautiful document of recent history.
Director, cinematography: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Editing: Gernot Grassl
Assistant director: Sophia Laggner
Sound: Sergey Martynyuk
Dramaturgical advisor: Claus Philipp
Producers: Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Michael Kitzberger, Wolfgang Widerhofer. Markus Glaser
Production company: NGF Geyrhalterfilm (Austria)
World sales: Autolook, Vienna
Venue: DOK Leipzig festival (International Competition Documentary Film)
In German
137 minutes
