‘Rose’ Review: Sandra Hüller Is a 17th Century Woman Passing as a Man in Intellectually Gripping Drama
Given the narrative overlaps and echoes, we might as well state the obvious: Markus Schleinzer’s “Rose” plays, in a sense, as a distant, Germanic cousin to “Boys Don’t Cry.” Both films recount true stories of strangers assigned female at birth who present as male, arriving in new towns where they quickly find companionship and community. In each case, those bonds cannot withstand the force of gender policing, leading to tragic ends shaped by similar prejudices. But the two paths diverge in tense.
Whereas Kimberly Peirce’s ’90s-set, ’90s-shot Oscar winner sought to galvanize the here and now — its pathos designed, at least in part, to provoke outrage and push the culture forward — Schleinzer looks far backward, refracting contemporary mores and expectations through an austere, alien light.
Set in 17th-century Prussia and premiering in present-day Berlin, Schleinzer’s film resists a straightforward contemporary trans reading. As signaled by its title, by a voice-over that consistently uses female pronouns, and by the character’s own admission, “Rose” follows a woman who sees in gender performance the most immediate and self-evident form of emancipation. “There’s more freedom in trousers,” she says succinctly.
Still, Rose (Sandra Hüller) is largely a woman of few words (for clarity, and in keeping with the film’s framing, we’ll retain female pronouns). She found freedom as a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War and took a bullet to the face in the process. The slug now hangs from a chain around her neck, just below the long scar along her left cheek, leaving her with a faint, permanent half-smile. In a time of rebuilding, and with her wartime valor etched plainly on her face, few in the village question her when she arrives to claim a fallen comrade’s farmhouse.
We too understand Rose through action — or the lack thereof. She stands quiet and still as a marauding black bear prowls nearby, using her stillness as a shield and hiding in plain sight. Danger passes with the seasons, bringing prosperity, integration, and new risks. Rose’s freedom comes at a cost: the expectation to forge deeper economic ties with the community through the property exchange known as marriage. Here, marital contracts betroth two consenting businessmen, holding the bride as collateral — and while Rose originally donned trousers and bound her breasts to escape this chattel system, her (rather literal) manumission now carries the expectation that she buy in.
Academically paced yet never slow, “Rose” unfolds with the same measured deliberation as its protagonist. Schleinzer demands — and rewards — close attention, revealing narrative twists and moral dilemmas with quiet precision. Through rigid, coal-and-ash–toned static shots, he constructs a period-accurate ethical minefield, letting us inhabit its unfamiliar terrain before confronting us with each new challenge to modern codes. Intellectually, the film is as gripping as it gets.
The film proves especially nimble with Rose’s wife. Suzanna (Caro Braun) enters the household as property, subtly shifting into a ticking time bomb under the social and contractual expectation that she soon conceive — and shifting again once she actually does. Without overstatement or any turn toward magical realism, her surprise pregnancy lands as a dark punchline, given the unfruitful instrument Rose uses to go through the motions, and takes on a far bleaker weight when we recall her father’s eagerness to secure her a marital bed.
That grim suggestion — never stated and all the more powerful for it — shows in the simple arch of Hüller’s brow, one of many subtle gestures in another commanding performance. Almost never offscreen, Hüller — and Braun, who has less screentime but is no less affecting — navigate unfamiliar situations with small, precise choices and reactions that cut through the deliberately alienating period setting, imparting an emotional energy that feels both current and relatable.
Such immediacy is all the more remarkable given the filmmaker’s sensibility. For his part, Schleinzer looks even further into the past, staging much of the film’s closing act in direct visual reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” Long before her sainthood — and her cinematic canonization — Joan of Arc herself was executed for gender nonconformity. That fact may be inconvenient for those eager to sanctify old prejudices. Schleinzer keeps it squarely in view.
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