Something strange takes place in the opening scenes of ‘Die Wand‘, the 2012 film by Austrian director Julian Polsler. A young woman travels on a trip to a remote cottage in the Alps with a couple of friends. They leave her alone for a short (shopping?) trip to the nearby village and do not return. The young woman goes in their search and finds that an invisible and impenetrable wall has appeared between the area where the cottage is located and the rest of the world. Or maybe the rest of the world has ceased to exist. Nobody comes looking for her. Alone in the middle of the mountains, with a dog, a cat and (conveniently) a cow she has to learn to survive by herself. A Robinson story, but without a shipwreck and with a woman as heroine. ‘Die Wand‘ could be a horror movie, it could be a survival movie and it’s a little bit of that, but it’s also something else entirely.
One of the fundamental rules of the fantastic genre is respected, the heroine being suddenly thrown from a familiar and (psychologically) comfortable environment into a hostile and dangerous world. Director and screenwriter Julian Polsler, who brought to screen a novel by a writer named Marian Haushofer, is less interested in the technical details of survival than in the emotional confrontation of the woman left alone with the surrounding nature and herself, with her revolt followed by the action and with her struggle against resignation and despair. We do not know anything about her past, about those she left in the existence ‘before’, we do not even know her name. And yet, throughout the film we get to know and understand her, we identify with her efforts to preserve her dignity and humanity. We can guess that she is an ordinary person who, like most of us, is not at all prepared for such an extreme situation. She finds the resources for what she does in herself, in the will to keep a diary (which maybe no one will read) and the calculation of the days, in the company of animals and in harmony with nature.
Much of the film’s persuasive power is due to Martina Gedeck, a formidable actress I know from ‘The Lives of Others‘ and many other memorable German films. The relationship with nature plays an important role, but unfortunately I did not find in the list of credits on IMDB who authored the cinematography. The soundtrack, which belongs to Bernd Jungmair, uses copiously classical music, especially from Bach’s compositions. Filled with symbols, more or less transparent about destiny and the human-nature relationship, ‘Die Wand‘ managed to capture my interest throughout the screening and make me care about the fate of the heroine. The directing style is discrete and this is intentional, taking into account that a very good horror film could have been made starting from the same first 10-15 minutes. The result is a film in which extreme physical situations are not completely absent, but psychological extremes are more important.