Solvent had its world première on 26th September at Slash Film Festival 2024
Solvent opens with a text quote from Norman Maclean’s autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (1976) about eternal waters in the darkness, running “over rocks from the basement of time” and haunting the author. Indeed this is a film about water – the universal solvent – and most of its second half unfolds in a basement. It is also, in keeping with its title, a film about chemical solutions – defined as a homogeneous mixture of two or more substances – and about the Final Solution. In other words, it is as rich in ideas and associations as Johannes Grenzfurthner’s previous horror films Masking Threshold (2012) and Razzennest (2022), and like the latter, tracks a filmmaker (of sorts) conjuring the atrocities of European history.
Here the ‘filmmaker’ is American Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries), whose permanently affixed helmet-cam allies our point-of-view to his, rendering him constantly audible but largely invisible. He is the founder of the small company Relocator, with expertise in “tracking hidden and potentially fragile goods” – and he is currently under contract with the Polish academic historian Krystyna Szczepanska (Aleksandra Cwen) – a regular client who is also an ex-lover. In the small Lower Austrian village of Egelsau in the Danube flood plain, they are to enter the abandoned farmhouse of Wolfgang Zinggl, who disappeared, age 94, in 2014 and was declared legally dead five years later. Wolfgang was a high-ranking Nazi and a pioneer in Extermination Camp efficiency during the Holocaust, and Krystyna hopes to find documentary evidence of where mass graves are hidden. In fact they will locate in the house little more than Nazi memorabilia, porn and labelled bottles of Wolfgang’s urine – but then jovial neighbour Fredi Weinhappl (Roland Gratzer) directs them to a smaller wine cellar across the road, where, in the basement, they will discover a pipe outlet protruding phallus-like from the floor – and all hell will break loose.
Most of Solvent is the video diary of Gunner, as he covertly returns to the scene were Krystyna began acting like a person possessed and where she – maybe accidentally – killed a colleague. Revisiting, and eventually taking up residence in, the barn’s basement, our PTSD-afflicted protagonist will gradually unravel, identifying a little too closely with his Nazi subject while also reexamining his own more recent past of dishonourable discharge from military service in Kuwait and of subsequent mercenary atrocities in Bosnia. “There’s no bottom,” Gunner will say, “no bottom to what people do to one another.” Yet down the bottom of that pipe, there is something in the water – the same water that flows through the nearby rivers, irrigates the fields and crops, and makes up about 60% of the human body – and whatever is in that water, dissolving and ever-changing, is now in Gunner too.
The first-person shots that dominate Solvent are occasionally punctuated – and ironised – by explosive choral montages of photos and archival footage that link Gunner’s immediate present to a submerged history. There are other ironies too: Wolfgang’s obnoxious grandson Ernst Bartholdi, who takes the crew through the farmhouse while himself in search less of the truth than of personal PR opportunities, is played by the director Grenzfurthner, while the photos of Wolfgang are in fact photos of Grenzfurthner’s late real-life grandfather Otto Zucker, who in 2008 had permitted the filmmaker to use his images in future projects so long as he “make me a real villain”. Meanwhile some of the pipe shots were taken, as text at the end points out, “in the plumbing system of Castle Leopoldskron in Salzburg, the filming location of Sound of Music.” Like Robert Wise’s 1965 film, this too is concerned with the clashing spirits of Nazism and resistance – here both in conflict within one individual – and is, if you wait for the closing credits sequence, itself also a musical.
Co-written with Benjamin Roberts, for the most part Solvent offers a very goofy kind of possession horror, which, as Gunner quips, “won’t pass the Bechdel test” – and is indeed far more focused on the male member than on the genre’s usual tits and ass. It also showcases a tasteless kind of comedy, where everyone is made to look grotesque (helped by the fisheye lens on Gunner’s camera), and where the (literal) piss is taken out of not just the extreme right but everything else. This has flowing on tap the kind of broad humour that would not be out of place in an Uwe Boll film (indeed one of Holbrook’s colleagues is named Kyle Edward Boll, in tribute both to Boll and the writer/director of Skinamarink, Kyle Edward Ball). Meanwhile German filmmaker Jörg Buttgereit provides the voice of a Nazi, while a Neo-Nazi (played by Sky Elobar) is expressly named ‘Mike Haneke’, in apparent tribute to Grenzfurthner’s more famous Austrian filmmaking compatriot.
Yet running beneath all this are the very real horrors of history. For the film deals in serious issues – the most serious – about human nature and our capacity for both evil and good (mixed, as in a solvent). That tonal dissonance between comedy and horror only adds to the discomfort created in the viewer, who is confronted with the awfulness, whether merely petty or outright genocidal, coursing invisibly, and often absurdly, through all our veins. You may, when it is all over, need a stiff drink – but maybe avoid the water…
strap: Johannes Grenzfurthner’s seriocomic first-person horror finds Nazis in the family history and something in the water
© Anton Bitel
