‘Oasis’ Venice Review: An Intimate Portrait of Bullying and Adolescent Rage

The many insidious forms of bullying are at the heart of Oasis, a German film that explores the issue through the experiences of three high school friends whose lives become intertwined with different manifestations of it. Like Adolescence and countless other films and series about the implicit and explicit violence that permeates teenage life, Jannis Lenz’s debut attempts to grapple with a problem that is as difficult to understand as it is to solve.

Lukas Vogler (Florian Geißelmann) is the film’s protagonist. The son of a well-respected teacher at his school, he’s a quiet, emotionally withdrawn teenager who spends much of his free time playing paintball with his best friend, Andi Meyer (Anton Petzold). The game’s barely concealed aggression serves as an outlet for the tensions both boys carry from home and school. Lukas lost his mother, and his father Martin (Godehard Giese) desperately tries —and consistently fails— to connect with him. About Andi, we learn only that his father is in the military and that the family has moved between bases in Germany and the United States. Completing the trio is Maya (Mathilda Smidt), whose backstory remains equally elusive, beyond the fact that she has a large, empty house where the three friends regularly gather.

Things take a turn at school when two videos begin circulating. In the first —much to the amusement of many classmates— Andi is shown naked in the gym, struggling to climb a rope. The second captures him in the schoolyard, furious, threatening other students while pointing his hand like a gun. His increasingly volatile behavior alarms both teachers and parents, prompting the school to respond with private meetings, group discussions, and even trust-building exercises intended to address the situation. But beneath the surface, nothing really changes.

Oasis ultimately focuses less on institutional responses than on the bond between these three outsiders, who spend more and more time in a nearby forest, playing paintball and filming one another as they explore their own bodies in ways that shift from aggressive to tender, from brutal to deeply vulnerable. It’s there that the film reveals their emotional fragility —particularly Andi’s— and makes clear that none of them really knows how to cope with the constant humiliation inflicted by their peers or the pressures imposed by their parents. Lukas retreats inward, avoiding confrontation whenever possible. Andi can’t. His inability to contain his anger repeatedly lands him in trouble, while those who provoke him always emerge unscathed from the tense, uncomfortable, or outright violent situations they themselves have created.

In his debut feature, Lenz explores the many layers of bullying and its consequences. There are the students who actively torment the others —Andi is overweight and relentlessly mocked because of it— those who remain silent bystanders, and the protagonists themselves, struggling, not always successfully, to survive that cruelty. Together they try to create a world that feels more in tune with their own emotions and instincts, but reality inevitably catches up with them. Neither parents nor school authorities prove capable of offering meaningful solutions. If anything, they only make matters worse.

By concentrating on the protagonists and on their almost embarrassed discovery of their own emotional vulnerability —Maya enjoys filming these intimate moments, while Andi would rather those videos didn’t exist— Lenz avoids reducing the film to an endless cycle of abuse and retaliation. The possibility that bullied teenagers can eventually become more violent than their tormentors is one of adolescence’s darkest realities, one that all too often ends in tragedy. What Lenz seeks to explore —and ultimately suggest— is that, once removed from the toxicity of school and family environments, these same teenagers are naturally drawn toward tenderness, affectionate physical contact, and something resembling happiness. But life outside their secluded refuge refuses to accommodate that fragile sanctuary. The conflict between those two worlds is where the film finds its true subject.

Lenz reinforces this tension through an abrasive, dissonant score and formal choices designed to keep the audience on edge, creating an atmosphere of constant, almost thriller-like menace. Yet just when Oasis seems poised to become another spectacle of cruelty —a trap many films on the subject fall into, however sympathetic they claim to be— the director sidesteps it, focusing instead on the three friends’ attempts to break free, in their own imperfect way, from that cycle. At times the script leans on familiar clichés (making one boy an orphan and another the son of a military officer hardly feels like the freshest characterization), but Lenz largely avoids the obvious pitfalls of this kind of story. The result is a thoughtful, oblique, and quietly incisive examination of the increasingly aggressive society we now inhabit.