One of the reasons I love horror is its unique ability to distill complex political ideas and emotions into what is, on the surface, a simple scary story. In much the same way that comedies disarm you with a laugh, horror puts you on your guard from ghosts or that weird shadow in one corner of the room, only to blindside you from the other.
It feels odd to be writing about the latest film from Austrian director Johannes Grenzfurthner – one might call it the finale in his pseudo-trilogy of features after Masking Threshold and Razzennest – today in particular. Only days removed from the real-life Austrian election in which a far-right party (the Freedom Party, or FPO) and it’s leader Herbert Kickl becomes the latest of it’s type in Europe to win a majority of votes, it makes Grenzfurthner seem scarily prescient to be thinking about a film about Nazi atrocities and the revelation that modern-day sociopolitical acts and events are far less removed from historical ones than one might assume.
In Solvent, a crew of modern-day treasure hunters attempt to unearth hidden Nazi secrets in an abandoned Austrian farmhouse. Taking place in 2023, they delve into the disappearance of a decorated Nazi officer named Wolfgang Zinggl, who holed up in the farmhouse, saving his urine in jars and visibly losing his grip on reality. Zinggl then vanished, taking with him a number of secrets, including the knowledge of a Nazi burial site. But as the investigation wears on, it’s lead Holbrook (Jon Gries, mostly in first-person) struggles with an obsessive need to reconcile the monstrous truths with his own.
But water, that universal solvent, has a way of smoothing and combining elements. As Holbrook unearths the nasty, rancid acts committed by his subject, it becomes clear that his own actions and experiences in modern war theatres like Kuwait and Bosnia aren’t so distinct from Zinggl’s. The water that flows under the farmhouse, mixing with the various fluids and passing through the body of Zinggl, comingles with Holbrook’s as well. Solvent is an exercise in grabbing the viewer and dragging them along with Holbrook in a current of mental collapse and decay. As his sanity erodes, he starts to unwittingly integrate with both his subject and his environment, running together in a cocktail of blood and urine and the liquified beliefs of the worst that fascism can offer.
The casting and structure of Solvent has the same mad and multi-textural quality of the film itself. We have characters named Kyle Edward Boll – a reference to both Kyle Edward Ball of Skinamarink fame and Uwe Boll of schlock cinema infamy – and Mike Haneke, presumably named after Grenzfurthner’s subversive fellow Austrian. Iconoclast Jello Biafra has a voice credit. Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League has a cameo. In every corner of Solvent, Grenzfurthner tucks references and sly jokes, never wasting a moment of his viewer’s attention (unless that’s his explicit intent). His ability to charm you with humour or with a deep cut reference, only to hit you with a revelation or imagery that is jarringly upsetting is almost unmatched in horror, and that is saying a lot.
It would be easy to use the first-person pseudo-documentary format, like so many found-footage horrors do, to manufacture jump scares or to hide behind an onscreen glitch. Solvent readily dissolves these tired tropes, never falling back on film grain filters or poorly-lit scenes designed to drop in meaningless scares behind low fidelity filmmaking in the name of staying “true” to the VHS or glitchy digital format. Unlike many found-footage horrors that distill a whole film’s experience down to a single scene or scare or concept, Solvent is multi-layered, and makes for an intriguing second or third rewatch, even long after you’re exposed to it’s main conceit. The scares aren’t just from a haunting presence, a particularly grotesque image, or a well-timed music cue to startle you. Instead, the horror here is the idea of being drawn down a rabbit hole and becoming the rabbit yourself. Like Grenzfurthner’s other films, Solvent is depraved, and wields that depravity to make the viewer confront their own obsessions, even if they might seem, or even be, benign. But rather than obscuring that depravity behind gimmicks and filters, everything remains in sharp focus. And as you tumble down the rabbit hole with Holbrook, you’ll probably wish it wasn’t.
Johannes Grenzfurthner’s Solvent has it’s North American Premiere at the Nightmares Film Festival in Columbus, Ohio on October 18. More information here.