I am obsessed with the films of Johannes Grenzfurthner (Razzennest, Masking Threshold), and I was somewhat concerned, as you know how when your favorite band has a new album, you worry if this is the one where they lose it or worse, sell out? That’s how I felt about this. Luckily, my concerns could be laid to rest. This has all the wildness that I expect from his films and then some. While I’d love to see him selected to direct a remake of RoboCop, I don’t think Hollywood is calling anytime soon after this.
That’s a good thing.
Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries!) is an American researcher who is going through a farmhouse in search of Nazi documents. But that’s the least of the strangeness that he uncovers, as Ernst Bartholdi (Grenzfurthner), the man who owns the property, takes him through the moldering home of his grandfather, Wolfgang Zinggl (archival footage by Otto Zucker, Grenzfurthner’s real grandfather), a man who disappeared and left no trace.
The team finds a metal pipe and decides to explore it until leader and Polish academic historian Krystyna Szczepanska (Aleksandra Cwen) has a mental breakdown from being near whatever is inside it, accidentally killing another member, Cornelia Dunzinger (Jasmin Hagendorfer). Everything is shut down, but Holbrook is now beyond intrigued; what he finds won’t just drive him insane; it will transform his body into some kind of rot. We learn that he and Krystyna were lovers, that he went AWOL when he got PTSD from serving in Kuwait and that he’s been a mercenary in Bosnia. Now, he will experience something perhaps no other human has or should.
I had the sheer joy of a long series of conversations with the creator of this art (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are posted here), during which he discussed the origins of this film in depth.
“The idea for Solvent came from this moment when I stepped into my grandfather’s old farmhouse after not having been there for ten years. There had been a rift in our family—my mother and her sister didn’t speak for a decade, partly due to inheritance disputes and family drama. When my aunt passed away, her daughter came back to Austria for the first time in twenty years, and we went to see what she inherited. It felt a lot like the story of Solvent.
When I stepped into that house, I could feel the mold attacking my lungs—it was horrendous. The smell was unbearable, and everything was decaying. But I spent some of my best childhood days there, so walking into that house again and seeing what my aunt had or hadn’t done with it hit me hard. I saw it through this nostalgic lens—how it used to look in my childhood, compared to how it was now, in ruins. Something in my brain shifted, and I thought, I need to do something with this. It felt like the perfect setting for a horror story.
I’ve always been fascinated by Austrian history, and the movie was born out of a need to confront Austria’s historical baggage—not in a traditional or sanitized way. The farmhouse, tied to my family’s history, became a metaphor for exploring guilt, complicity, and how the past still seeps into the present. Austria has this unique way of dealing with its Nazi past. When I was in school in the 1980s, we didn’t learn a lot about the Nazi era. The German school curriculum, by contrast, was much more proactive about it. But in Austria, it was as if the country didn’t exist between 1938 and 1945. Austrians were very eager to forget, despite the fact that most of the concentration camps were run by Austrians.
Austria was never good at confronting the past, and I saw this gap in my conversations with friends, their parents, and grandparents. It was as if Austria had this hole in its soul, this thing that no one wanted to talk about. The more time passes, the more people forget. And that’s the core of the film—there’s something in the ground in Austria that never goes away, something that still affects us. It doesn’t matter if you talk about it or not—it will catch up with you. It’s very Freudian, embedded into everything, this festering wound that never heals.”
I usually do my best to avoid found-footage films, as the shaky camera and rules of the form feel nauseating and constrictive. That said, Grenzfurthner’s films are so technically proficient and just plain unsettling, moving and wonderous that I get over myself very quickly. This is yet another triumph for him, a film that begs to be experienced.
You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles and updating my Letterboxd list of watches.
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