By SHAWN MACOMBER
Starring Jon Gries, Aleksandra Cwen and Johannes Grenzfurthner
Directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner
Written by Johannes Grenzfurthner and Benjamin Roberts
Film Movement
There is no shortage of films that strive to portray a descent into madness. But there are very few, if any, that do so as convincingly–or from such an unsettling and disorienting direct first-person perspective–as SOLVENT, the latest from Austrian writer/director and provocateur Johannes Grenzfurthner, who previously gleefully fed minds into the blender with 2021’s MASKING THRESHOLD and 2023’s RAZZENNEST.
First and foremost, SOLVENT (coming to VOD and digital platforms this Friday, October 10) is a wild, harrowing experience. We’re talking about a film that not only has “human liquefaction” as a central plot point and continually juxtaposes its flashes of extraordinarily gnarly body horror, Nazi newsreels and images of man’s inhumanity to man against pastoral footage so serene it makes FIELD OF DREAMS look like the darkened moors of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. It is so intense and dissonant, in fact, that at moments viewers may feel a new twinge of empathy for Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, strapped down with his eyes propped open to those “nasty bits of ultraviolence”–including flashes of…Nazi newsreels and images man’s inhumanity to man–projected on a screen while his beloved Beethoven’s Ninth plays in the background.
SOLVENT opens with a mercenary named Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries of THE WHITE LOTUS and NAPOLEON DYNAMITE fame, but to many of us forever Lazlo in REAL GENIUS and O.D. in TERRORVISION) arriving at a dilapidated farmhouse belonging to an elderly unreconstructed Nazi who has disappeared. Holbrook is ostensibly there to help some academics see if anything of historic value is on site, yet through banter, vague flashbacks to other expeditions and an otherwise inexplicable willingness to humor that Nazi’s eccentric grandson (portrayed with dark hilarity by Grenzfurthner himself), it becomes clear they are looking for something more specific and sinister.
And boy, do they ever find it. Turns out there’s a bunker next to the farmhouse filled with esoteric literature, a bottled urine collection and a water pipe that, when touched by one of the researchers, immediately results in a serious case of insanity. Though they are declared personas non grata in the aftermath and it’s disquieting enough to offer obvious deterrence, Holbrook cannot stay away. Obsessed, he returns with camera in hand to search the pipe, and finds something dark and semi-humanoid deep below: a grotesque secret that has the potential to possess and consume him in ways that will rearrange the conception of reality and leave even fans of Cronenbergian horror a bit queasy. No spoilers, but zip ties and a recalcitrant phallus are involved.
The surrealistic nightmare Holbrook endures, however, is a micro dehumanizing debasement through which Grenzfurthner examines more macro societal issues–as one may presume when Nazism plays a role. Actual history: Even as the Berlin above his bunker was shelled into dust by advancing Allied forces and he prepared to commit suicide, Adolf Hitler was seized with an delusional optimism, swearing in his last will and testament that “the seed of a radiant renaissance of the National-Socialist movement” would one day “spring up” again.
SOLVENT as allegory: What if, as the civilized world closely watched the ground above for signs of this “springing,” boot forever raised to crush and grind it out, the darkness instead sunk lower, undetected, poisoning and defiling our elemental foundations? In other words, by ignoring unpleasant truths and histories, do we allow them to become more virulent and harder to counter, like a cancer ignored while mutated cells proliferate beneath the surface? It’s a series of big swings that Grenzfurthner mostly hits out of the park, which makes the film’s uneven or too belabored moments more forgivable than would otherwise be the case in an anodyne or modest effort.
Overall, you could look at SOLVENT as a the grossest, most festering, conspiratorial, hateful corners of the political landscape, Internet or our own primitive fear-and-control-wired minds physicalized and summoned into life. This as we realize only too late that worshipping venom and human liquefaction is not only disastrous, but a pretty (bottled) piss-poor alternative to sacrificing enough of our egos and need to control to allow us to love one another–or at the very least abandon the all-too-beguiling pursuit of hate.
