Kate Schroeder
Smoke rises from the ground in the rural countryside of Germany in the 17 th century. Small
plumes reveal themselves as ashes that make way to reveal Sandra Hüller’s Rose, a young
soldier with a distinctive scar from a bullet that ripped through her cheek while battling for her
country in the Thirty Years’ War. As a reminder of her victory, Rose carries that bullet, flattened
from impact, on a chain around her neck and sucks on it like a toddler might hold a pacifier,
seeking peace in a chaotic and unpredictable environment. She is literally, and metaphorically,
biting the bullet.
When the audience meets Rose, she is doing everything she can to remain in control of that
environment. Following the war, Rose has assumed the identity as the male heir of a farmstead
in the countryside. To the public, Rose is considered a mysterious man, who conducts his
farmland with dignity. He feeds her people well, pays them fair wages, and teaches them to
read and write, a rather priceless trade. At one point he saves one of his worker’s lives from a
bear attack, and becomes more of a local myth, on his way to becoming a legend.
As his ambition grows, he acquires more land, and a dowry that consists of weighty linen, Rose
takes up a marriage with a rural homemaker named Suzanna. Over time, the two develop a
genuine care, their bond strengthened once Rose miraculously sire’s a son, and her secret is
unwillingly revealed. Suzanna, like Rose, desires freedom and the two agree to conceal Rose’s
secret for their autonomy. Smartly, the script avoids a romantic subplot, and focuses the
protagonist’s goal of becoming the head of a household which at the time came hand in hand
with money, power, choice, and societal respect, all of which is threatened to be taken away
once the villagers get word that this mysterious man just might be a woman.
Rose, written by screenwriters Alexander Brom and Markus Schleinzer, who doubles as the
director, is a fictional story based on an amalgamation of women who disguised themselves as
men for various reasons – to assume power, to avoid rape – many of which were put to death
for a crime of sodomy. After years of research, Brom and Schleinzer fill in the gaps of the true
story of a woman to who is believed to be the last in Germany’s history to be tried and
murdered for this indecency. Perhaps devised as such to erase a bestiality, all that’s known of
this mysterious woman is that her life meets a tragic end. Through the lens of her court case,
Brom and Schleinzer imagine how she built a life of deception, and is curious to uncover her
motivation.
There’s much to be said about the mystery of this “man”, to which the villagers and people take
in kindly. To them, he is a man of few words, who keeps to a promise, and teaches the locals
literacy, and attends church on Sundays. The mystery here for the audience works not in the
who but the how. How did she get the deed to the land? How was she able to impregnate
Suzanna? For the audience, the mystery is more a question of how Sandra Hüller is pulling off
yet another career-defining performance?
What Hüller is doing in Rose is twofold. Emotionally, for the majority of the movie she is playing
the character with restraint, pent up over the course of the first two acts to that explodes by
the third-act, when she scolds her kin about the rumors of her gender in a heated and
vulnerable speech. Physically, she finds the man in her mannerisms, spreading her legs to
urinate outdoors like an unbothered male, or building out the farm. She engages in intercourse
with her wife, at that point still unaware of her gender, in a scene that Schleinzer shrouds in
shadows.
One wonders if this story were set in the U.S. post a great war, the film would be filled with fire
and brimstone, message-laden moments. Yet in the capable hands of Schleinzer, this story
remains in shallow breath. That is not to say the film lacks depth, but Schleinzer trusts his
audience to understand, and feel, just how deep her pain and Rose’s fight goes in what goes
unsaid. For the stakes are far too high for her to crack. Schleinzer knows what he’s asking of his
protagonist, but he also knows what he has in Hüller, who has already proved she can play
moral gray areas well in both Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest. It will come as no
surprise she is not only effective, but effortlessly sublime here. This masterful performance
already won her the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival this year, another highlight for
the actress who is getting Oscar buzz for her other films out this year in Fatherland and Project
Hail Mary, both of which have earned her great acclaim. At the risk of ranking her 2026 slate, I
care not. Rose debuts Hüller as one of the most vital actresses of her generation. One who can
challenge an audience as well as she can charm one.
Rounding out the village, Schleinzer relied on his casting background and mixed legacy actors
with those early in their careers to devise an authentic ensemble of maturity among the cast.
This works particularly well in the dynamic between the veteran Hüller, and German actress
Caro Braun, who is captivating as the naïve but earnest Suzanna, in her feature film debut.
Schleinzer also adds a narrator to the story, an unseen character that is reading used to
advance the plot. It’s unclear who is speaking, though one could imagine it’s a historian later in
time discovering the letters Rose wrote before her execution, reading her story aloud. It’s told
like a fireside chat that tells the audience what’s about to happen and primes them emotionally
(i.e. after a sweet moment between Rose and Suzanna, warns the audience that the day will get
worse.) It also functions to tell the story without having to get grotesque (i.e. telling of Rose’s
execution, which is botched on the first try, without having to show it). In a story about
concealment and perspective, Schleinzer is respectful and tasteful towards the women we’ve
grown to admire, in showing more on how they lived rather than how history remembered
them in their deaths.
The film’s overall message can be debated, but Schlenzier does not position the story as one of
gender confirmations or same-sex partnerships, nor falls into the trappings of a female empowerment story or a victim narrative. Instead, Rose speaks of freedom, and in this community in this time period freedom was found through trousers. In case there is any doubt, Rose tells the court before being sentenced to death. When then questioned who allowed her to put on pants, she said she did it herself. And in she was accused of the ultimate sin: one created one’s self.
The striking black and white cinematography by Gerald Kerkletz supports this theme well.
Taking away color adds contrast that effectively allows the audience to judge the characters off
their actions rather than their stature, or perceived status that at that time could have been
communicated by the color of one’s garments. Kerkletz frames Huller with an intimacy that
feels more like a documentary, and he way animals and plants dip in and out of frame with ease
gives a sense that despite whatever power humans decide they have, the earth will continue on
in its own rhythms and harmony, in an oddly comforting artistic pacifier.
At just over 90 minutes, the film tells a story with just enough narrative flair to hold attention,
and keep from slogging down with details of a rough-and-odorous setting of the old world and
it’s many, many set pieces with mud, as other films have favored.
SCORE: ★★★1/2
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