It’s fitting that the best movie I saw at the Berlin Film Festival was a bleak and artful movie set in Germany, or at least what would one day become Germany. Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s Rose is set in the 17th century and concerns a woman who has lived most of her life passing as a man, from the battlefields of the Thirty Years’ War to a post-combat restart as the (false) inheritor of a farm in a rural, conservative Protestant enclave. Rose is played by the great Sandra Hüller in her first big project since Anatomy of a Fall.

Well, big might not be exactly accurate. Her real cash-in gig is in the upcoming Project Hail Mary, with Ryan Gosling, but Rose is certainly significant by other measures. Shot in rich black-and-white, the film has the elegant bearing of prime-grade festival fare, complete with modern political allegory. (It is, I think, about the pointless cruelty of legislating gender expression; though, of course, I could be wrong about that.) One could easily see the film playing well at any of the major film festivals (like, say, Cannes), but it’s set to release in Germany and Austria this spring, so Berlin was the place to give it its debut. 

I’d imagine it will be one of the more talked about titles here. Hüller, a star at this festival who won its Silver Bear acting prize 20 years ago, is in fine form. Though she has far less dialogue than she got to tear into in Anatomy of a Fall (or in Toni Erdmann, for that matter), she holds the center of the film with quiet purpose. Schleinzer deftly blends comedy, tragedy, and the slightest bit of suspense as Rose takes ever more risks with her concealed identity. Narrated as if a fairytale, Rose has a touch of the otherworldly about it, though gradually Schleinzer reminds us that this is all taking place in a very real, very rigid world indeed.