War films are a dime a dozen, from the very first Academy Award-winner for Best Picture (1927’s Wings) to the recent Oscar-winning epic 1917. Great war films provide the opportunity to display the true extremes of the human experience — abject cruelty, selfless sacrifice, strange subservience, incomprehensible violence, and hope in the face of horror. All of these concepts and more can be glimpsed in the bold new Stefan Ruzowitzky film Hinterland.
The Oscar-winning director of The Counterfeiters has created a visually iconoclastic, digitally kaleidoscopic crime thriller focused on the aftermath of World War One and the experience of being a prisoner of war. Using complicated blue-screen technology, Hinterland brings a 1920s film noir landscape to strange, smoky life in a way that hearkens back to German Expressionism in the way that Sin City, or even better, Dark City did. The complicated visuals alone are worth the price of admission (which you can check out below in an exclusive trailer), but the script from Ruzowitzky, Robert Buchschwenter, and Hanno Pinter uses the imagery to complement this dark crime thriller.
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Hinterland is a Post-War Crime Thriller
Hinterland takes place in 1920 after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from ‘The Great War.’ The sociopolitical situation is viewed through the lens of Peter Perg (Murathan Muslu), a former detective who had been held as a prisoner of war. He returns to Vienna after the war as a stranger in a strange land; neither he nor the city are what they used to be. When a comrade of his (another veteran) is killed, Perg begins to investigate, only to discover that several other POWs are being murdered.
Perg joins up with someone from his past, the forensic doctor Theresa Körner (played by Liv Lisa Fries, of Munich — The Edge of War and Babylon Berlin), in order to solve the murders. As the two dig deeper into the proverbial graveyard of the war, they discover links between the dead soldiers and various political forces in the city. Caught in a web of death, anti-democratic politicians, toxic men without accountability, and a fallen city, Perg and Körner will have to reevaluate everything they thought they knew.
Ruzowitzky has always been a filmmaker who’s keenly interested in history, and how the personal intersects with the political. Whether he’s making intense, violent films like Anatomy and The Inheritors or more prestige dramas like The Counterfeiters and All the Queen’s Men, the director has almost always tackled the consequences of historical traumas, usually focusing specifically on the two World Wars. Hinterland is no different, though it does push his aesthetic to its utmost extreme with a visually panoramic, dizzying depiction of the aftermath of war.
Ruzowitzky On Hinterland
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The director’s statement for the film is particularly enlightening:
The audience award-winner at the Locarno Film Festival, Ruzowitzky’s film Hinterland will be available through digital platforms and on demand beginning Oct. 7th.
Perg and hundreds of thousands of his comrades return from war, the ultimate place where man can prove himself against man. They have lost this war, they feel shame and anger, they suffer from their “failure.” They react to this with blind aggression – against others, against themselves. In these new times after the great war, nothing feels right and straightforward to men like Perg; everything seems deformed and out of kilter.
We have tried to depict the image of an essentially distorted world for Hinterland, a digital version of the silent film classic The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari, as it were, in which we worked with expressionistically crooked backdrops. Hinterland was shot almost exclusively on blue screen. We tried to create an exciting balance between this hard, loud, brutal man’s world and the complex soul landscapes of our protagonists with their existential wounds.
