Rose: Sandra Hüller is quietly mesmerising in this gender-defying German period drama

• Reviewed from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival

History is written by the winners, runs the truism. Survivors might get a chance to tell their own stories, but how far can we push that? How far can we imagine ourselves into being? Rose (Sandra Hüller) is a woman who has put on a pair of trousers – “a simple piece of cloth” – to claim the freedom which comes with being a man in 17th-century Germany. Having fought in the army during the Thirty Year War, she arrives at a small village to claim an inheritance with a bullet wound in her face and the assumed identity of a gentleman. The villagers are at first suspicious but she manages to win over their trust with some bear killing and by proving herself as a farmer, restoring the land and the farmhouse.

It helps that she now has money and pays liberally. There’s only so far you can interrogate a gentleman and a veteran of the wars and a local farmer even decides to wed his daughter Suzanna (Caro Braun) to Rose, adding another layer of intrigue and complexity. The story is told to us by a narrator, Marisa Growaldt, whose words clash with what we are seeing on screen, in a way similar to that of Michael Horden’s ironically detached narration in Barry Lyndon (1975). For instance, Rose is referred to by her real name throughout the narration and we are denied the assumed identity by which everyone else must know her. Because we know the hidden her, is this the real her? The narrator also takes on a moralistic tone to depict Rose’s deceit and wickedness which are at odds with Rose’s quiet struggle to make her way in the world. The narration is society’s voice, more authoritative than the village, and the dread is that it is the voice of the winners.

This is Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s third feature as director following his profile of a paedophile in the severe and Michael Haneke influenced Michael (2011) and his period film Angelo (2018). Having worked with Jessica Hausner and Haneke as a casting director, Schleinzer takes on a similar formalism to the Austrian maestro of melancholy which is evident in the careful framing of each shot, maintaining an implacable, or perhaps discrete distance. A sharp icicle of wit runs through the film as we anticipate Rose’s dilemmas and her resourcefulness in overcoming them. In Gerald Kerkletz’s beautiful black and white cinematography, the film resembles Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), and there is a similar dissonance between the vividly captured natural world, the solid thingness of the home which Rose is building and the sense of doom. She contemplates the sky and her crops, and we see the house nestled in its knoll, with the stars glittering above. That won’t help. Nature will sting you in the end. 

Following performances in 2024’s The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, and before that one-two Toni Erdmann (2016), Hüller has become one of the most accomplished and recognised actors in the European film scene. Her supple turn here provides the film with its emotional clout. Hers is the performance of a performance, but it is done with subtle gestures – a certain gait – and a quiet withdrawal. If the villagers see her as odd, so be it. Her bullet wound leaves her Janus-faced, with half of it frozen in a droop. She wears the offending bullet around her neck and sucks on its metal. Rose sees the bullet partly as a lucky charm and partly as a symbol of how shapes can be shifted – the bullet itself was deformed when it struck her. 

It is clear, indeed explicit, that she is a woman performing maleness. She wants the advantages which come with patriarchy. She also attempts to educate the villagers and her wife as well as treating her men fairly. Though it’s not expressed directly, the film speaks to modern-day policing of gender. Suzanna’s pregnancy is a further complication, which shows that there are more frauds being perpetrated in the village than Rose’s.

In some ways, the film is a gender-flipped retelling of Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) – remade as Sommersby in 1993 with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster – but here there is no mystery as to the identity of the imposter. It’s literally in the title of the film. Rose is a tragedy about history’s losers, its victims and those who don’t get to write their own story.