For the past three years, Sandra Hüller has been on a generational run of film performances in both the Hollywood and international spaces. In 2023, she earned her first Academy Award nomination for her lead role in the Palme d’Or winner, Anatomy of a Fall, as well as starring in another Oscar-nominated film of the same awards year, The Zone of Interest. Since then, she has remained booked and busy, to say the least, as 2026 will be a landmark year for Hüller as she appears in four major features: Project Hail Mary, Digger, Fatherland, and Rose (screening in the Main Slate section at the 64th New York Film Festival). Of these roles, Hüller’s stoic presence in Rose rises to the top and proves that very few actors can lay a character’s heart on display the way she can.
Rose is Markus Schleinzer’s third feature film and his first in eight years, yet this gap in productions might just be his key to success. Much like his narratives in Michael (2011) and Angelo (2018), Schleinzer dissects his titular characters with a day-in-the-life approach, allowing their mundane tasks to reveal the intricacies of their personalities. However, Schleinzer employs a narrator akin to that of a storybook in Rose, causing Rose’s tale to feel like a forgotten Brothers Grimm entry.
Set in 17th-century Europe in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, we meet Rose shortly after she has fled her post in the military. Disguised as a man, she arrives in a secluded Protestant community with a stolen identity, claiming she has inherited nearby farmland. Although the townspeople seem suspicious at first, they quickly welcome her and provide farming tools and servants to restore the inherited property. Hüller’s demeanor during this acquisition scene could strike fear in anyone who questions her truth, partly because she embraces such a dynamic and masculine physicality as a wounded soldier. Acting through a heavy prosthetic across half her face is no easy task either, and she manages to evoke sympathy in a way that is not pitiful but out of respect.
When one of the village’s leaders notes that Rose is without a wife or children, he insists that she marry one of the available daughters in their congregation; mind you, Rose never reveals her true name nor discusses her religious affiliations with these strangers, so there is a subdued, ironic tone permeating many interactions between her and this conservative community. Thus, as any upstanding man during this time should, Rose marries the eldest daughter, Suzanna (played by Caro Braun), and the two enter an awkward, dysfunctional union.
Although Hüller helms this film, praise must also be shared with Braun, who brings Suzanna’s adolescent wonder into a situation that could easily feel torturous. For a while, she dotes on Rose with the hope that they will conceive a child (much to her father’s demands), yet we know this is not humanly possible. Nonetheless, Rose finds a way to pleasure Suzanna in surely one of the most amusing sex scenes of the year involving a makeshift strap-on. Braun’s chemistry with Hüller combusts once her character magically becomes pregnant, but this fleeting romance dissipates quickly when Suzanna and one of the farmhands discover Rose’s true sex.
Schleinzer’s screenplay builds a heavy third act that outweighs some of the humor promised in the subplot about Rose and Suzanna’s marriage, and it unfortunately falls into tired tropes of witch-hunt narratives. Despite this disjunction, Hüller finds her meatiest scenes here as she swats away villagers’ accusations about her female identity. At the peak of her persecution, Hüller stands in front of a mob and dares them to lay their hands on her or her family, and the timber in her voice resonates so deep that it will rattle your bones. Rose flails in her last-ditch efforts to protect her private life, consequently shattering the burly facade she’s held for so long.
While one can surely classify Rose as a fairytale, Rose and Suzanna’s love story ends as anything other than a tragedy. Gerald Kerkletz’s striking black-and-white cinematography saturates the couple’s defeated souls, painting them as martyrs in a time and place where God rules above all. Additionally, Schleinzer’s allusions to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) are heavy-handed and, frankly, unnecessary, but Hüller breaks through the obvious to present a woman who will not be defined by the prejudice of others. In Rose’s final days, she insists on rehearsing her execution with the village as a way to force guilt into their community, basically declaring that she and Suzanna will haunt them once this chapter closes – and they certainly do as Rose exhales for the last time.
Rose is the type of queer film that should be lauded more for definitively existing in the gray; it is not a straightforward transgender narrative nor an Oscar-bait trauma piece. This film is about the individual and the right we are owed to live freely, regardless of how some self-righteous individuals believe we should live. The bravest of us will live out loud, and hopefully that courage can bring more of us out of the shadows.
Review Courtesy of Kyle Saavedra
Feature Image Courtesy of MUBI
