‘Rose’ Berlinale Review: Identity, Survival and Patriarchy in a 17th-Century Village

Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer first made a name for himself with his 2011 debut Michael, a rigorously controlled and quietly harrowing portrait of a pedophile who kidnaps a boy and keeps him locked in a basement. Nothing in that film quite prepares you for the fact that, years later, this austere formalist would turn his attention to the story of a woman in the 17th century who chooses to live as a man. Shot in stark black and white, Rose stars none other than Sandra Hüller—best known internationally for her work in Anatomy of a Fall—as a woman who settles in a remote village in what would eventually become Germany after the Thirty Years’ War and proceeds to pass as male.

Why does she do it? The voiceover suggests that sexuality has little to do with it. Instead, she discovers that wearing trousers and performing masculinity grants her a degree of authority, credibility, and social standing that would otherwise be unavailable to her as a woman. Initially regarded with suspicion—her wiry frame, war wounds, and legal documents claiming land don’t exactly inspire confidence—the character (whose chosen name we never learn) gradually integrates into village life. She works, attends church, invests money, builds, collaborates, becomes a pillar of the community and, eventually, gets married. Or rather, she is offered Suzanna (Caro Braun), a kind-hearted woman who proves far more perceptive than she first appears.

The marriage is never fully “consummated,” but in a community so steeped in religious devotion and repression, abstinence reads less as scandal than as another form of piety or self-denial. “Rose” does not define herself as either man or woman. She simply exists—socially functional, structurally compliant—except, of course, in private. And it’s there that things begin to unravel, forcing a gradual reconfiguration of identities, expectations, and ultimately, the characters’ fates.

For all its formal severity, Rose contains moments of peculiar, almost stealthy humor. Hüller’s stony, unreadable face goes a long way toward keeping suspicions at bay—not just among the villagers but within her own household. Comedy seeps into the cracks of daily life, especially when Suzanna becomes pregnant. For “Rose,” this development provides reassurance that no one will question her masculinity. But it also opens up a far stranger line of inquiry: what, exactly, happened?

What follows is less predictable than expected and hinges largely on the evolving relationship between the two women—one that transcends prescribed roles and gender binaries. There’s a form of solidarity here that may well spare them both from serious trouble. Schleinzer handles this stretch with a gravity reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dreyer, though fleeting moments of humor punctuate the unfolding discoveries. Rose never slips into farce or parody; its sense of estrangement emerges instead from the slow realization that heterosexual pairing might be just another social convention among many.

None of this would carry its emotional weight without Hüller, an actress capable of expressing entire constellations of conflicting emotions through the slightest physical adjustment or glance. Schleinzer—who comes from a casting background and has worked with filmmakers like Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl—surrounds her with figures who seem to have stepped out of a period painting. And yet the film’s true “rose,” the element that crowns the whole enterprise, is Hüller herself: less a woman imitating a man than something closer to a ranch foreman in an old western. In that sense, Rose plays like a western in disguise—less about gender than about power, hierarchy, and the many strange mutations of patriarchy.