Rose

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

ROSE   ***

Markus Schleinzer

2026

IDEA:  A woman in 17th-century rural Germany disguises as a man in order to live in freedom. 

BLURB:  Rose opens on scorched earth and skeletons and proceeds through a series of landscapes so funereal you wonder how anyone’s living in them. From scene to scene, Gerald Kerkletz’s silvery cinematography makes the images appear alternately like intricate metal engravings or tableaux of graphite and charcoal, and his use of extreme wide shots and frames-within-frames render a world of desolation and constriction, respectively. It’s hospitable to those who adhere to the dogmatic rules of 17th-century German Protestantism, but that’s certainly not Sandra Hüller’s Rose, who rejects her assigned subservient role as a woman by switching to the only gender with any agency or power. Her transformation, like the more metaphysical one of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, reveals the arbitrary cultural construction of gender. The qualities that go unquestioned when Rose is male — her capabilities as a landowner, community leader, or romantic partner — are suddenly void when she’s recognized as a woman. In a scene clearly designed, quite didactically, to address the transphobes of today, Rose stands at the door of her home lambasting the townsfolk’s obsession with her anatomy and demanding they all reveal their own sexes. Hüller’s gesticulating fury seems to exceed her body’s ability to contain it, and she explodes in humorous paroxysms that mock the crowd’s religious hysteria. When put on trial for her deceit, the actress becomes more subdued but no less exasperated by her scrutiny, fielding questions like “Why would one act this way?” with a perplexed expression and a bitter incredulity in her voice. Hüller turns saintly by the concluding images, her battle-scarred face resting into repose as a straw crown makes her a spitting image of Falconetti’s Joan of Arc. Rose’s journey would have been plenty legible without the storybook narration to guide us here; Schleinzer’s and Hüller’s craft take care of things. But in its directness, Rose is sufficiently damning toward a worldview that cares a whole lot more about damnation than love.