What happens when imagining the future is overwhelming, and looking at the past only brings sorrow? That’s the predicament facing Marian (Brigitte Hobmeir) in Elisabeth Scharang’s Woodland, a drama haunted with regret and guilt, tracing a woman’s journey through trauma across overly familiar terrain.
“You pay for what you get. You keep your word. You don’t let family down. You live the life your mother gave you, as best you can.” Those are the rules laid out by Franz (Johannes Krisch), the former village heartthrob and Marian’s long ago ex-lover, when she mysteriously returns to her rural family farm. It’s her first time back in decades since her parents and grandparents have passed and the old house — with a leaky roof and no electricity — needs a serious airing out. Her arrival immediately raises the hackles of the close-knit community; she might have grown up and moved on but they haven’t. The ill-tempered Gerti (Gerti Drassl), her closest neighbor, and Franz, both put up a frosty front. The residents eye Marian, an award-winning journalist who has exposed secrets about the town, with suspicion. Even Marian’s husband Georg (Bogdan Dumitrache) is left uncertain about why she’s suddenly decamped, alone, to the countryside.
The reasons for Marian’s self-imposed exile are rooted in her trauma following the 2020 terror attack in Vienna during which an ordinary evening dining out with Georg turned into a nightmare. But the event — that she walked away from deeply unshaken, but physically unharmed — unshackles a reckoning that’s been a long time coming. Scharang aims to explore the repercussions of accumulated traumas and residual pain; the manner in which emotional violence manifests in different forms. Unfortunately, her screenplay parcels out the wreckage of Marian’s past parsimoniously, leaving the audience witnessing her grief often before the foundation for it is fully understood, playing catch up to Marian rather connecting with her turmoil. This structural withholding of critical character information can’t hide the fact that, ultimately, Woodland offers little new about the way suffering takes hold. More perplexing is that once Marian’s full picture comes into view, it’s actually Gerti’s story that becomes more compelling and sympathetic.
Woodland slowly pivots into detailing both the pitfalls of following Franz’s guidebook for maintaining generational traditions, and the cost of abandoning it altogether. Marian may be disconnected from her past, but Gerti, having never left the house she grew up in, giving up on her dreams of emigrating, and now caring for her abusive father and slowly unraveling mother, has no place to escape to heal. For all of Marian’s pain she has another life, and a loving husband, waiting for her when she wants it. This privilege neither she nor the script seems to recognize. “People like you always win,” Gerti snipes at Marian not long after she arrives. It’s a barb that’s meant to be ignorant of Marian’s real reasons for returning home, but it turns out to be true, and carries more weight than the film may want to admit.
From Marian screaming in anguish in the forest to screaming in anguish in the house, Scharang’s depiction of despair hits very few notes. Similarly, the spare, repeated motif of the piano score by Hania Rani, feels like it could be slotted into any number of moody arthouse pictures. And the climatic inclusion of Rani’s song “Home” — opening with the lyrics “Home, I feel like home / Though nothing is as was before / No words to say, no place to go” — makes thuddingly and jarringly obvious what Scharang prefers to treat obliquely everywhere else.
These choices don’t do justice to the strong performances by Hobmeir and Drassl, who untangle the complexity of a close relationship splintered equally by chance and conviction to their choices in life with a tender thorniness. As their relationship flickers with the flames of rekindling, it’s a momentary sketch of authentic healing, hinting at a version of Woodland that could’ve been more fully formed.
Director: Elisabeth Scharang
Screenplay: Elisabeth Scharang
Cast: Brigitte Hobmeier, Gerti Drassl, Bogdan Dumitrache, Johannes Krisch
Producers: Ulrike Lässer, Veit Heiduschka, Michael Katz
Cinematography: Jörg Widmer
Production design: Nina Salak
Editing: Alarich Lenz
Music: Hania Rani
Sound: William Edouard Franck, Manuel Grandpierre
Production companies: WEGA Filmproduktion (Austria)
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Centrepiece)
In German
95 minutes
