PopHorror Let's Get Scared
After reading our interview with Filmmaker Johannes Grenzfurthner about his new project, Solvent, I decided I needed to check this film out. Anything involving missing Nazis, decrepit farmhouses, delusional filmmakers, and the director’s actual grandfather had to be awesome, right?
Here’s the synopsis:
While searching for Nazi documents in an Austrian farmhouse, a team of experts uncovers a hidden secret buried in its bowels. American expatriate Gunner S. Holbrook becomes obsessed with solving the mystery, and as his sanity wanes, he must confront an insatiable evil. Can he find redemption before it drains the life out of him?
Solvent (2024) was directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner (Masking Threshold 2022) from a script co-written by himself and Benjamin Roberts (Able Bodies 2022). The film also stars Grenzfurthner, Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Gries, Polish actress Aleksandra Cwen (F Is For Freaks 2019), and Grenzfurthner’s late grandfather, who only appeared in photographs but played a major role in the story.
Solvent tells the story of guerrilla filmmaker Gunner S. Holbrook (Gries) as he films his investigation into the disappearance of Ernst Bartholdi’s (Grenzfurthner) grandfather, Wolfgang Zinggl (Otto Zuckerberg), a Nazi during the Second World War. He has a team of people working with him, including Bartholdi and his ex-girlfriend, Krystina (Cwen). Everyone is there for the adventure, at least at first. Searching the old man’s the dilapidated, mold-encrusted farmhouse proves to be quite the treasure hunt. Photos and documents are found under collapsed ceilings and inside the brittle pages of old books. The mood is almost jolly. Who knows what they’ll find in the next room?
When the filmmakers stumble on a partially hidden cave on the property, they see no reason not to continue on with their search. However, something terrible happens when Krystina goes into the cave alone, and her reaction to whatever it is has fatal consequences. Yet, despite the death of one member of his crew and the abject refusal of Ernst to allow Gunner back onto his grandfather’s property, the young filmmaker becomes obsessed with what’s lurking in this underground lair.
What Works
Not only does Solvent follow Gunner on his very personal journey through the mind of an insane madman, it takes place in a found footage, first person POV, only showing us what he sees and hears. We don’t get any information that doesn’t come straight from the American’s experiences. I haven’t seen such a clever and compelling use of this filmmaking style since Jozsef Gallai’s I Hear The Trees Whispering (2022). The viewer is chained to the mindset and visuals of the slowly deteriorating Gunner, with no way to look away from everything he experiences. And he makes sure to keep his camera on at all times.
“All life is a rebellion against faith…”
While there’s nothing particularly bloody about Solvent, there are some disturbing visuals, including a dead fish being stuffed into a bag, dozens of bottles of collected urine, a dead mouse in a glass jar that looked a little too real, and an extremely gory shot at the end of the film of a place no pipe inspection camera should ever go. These gruesome images are made worse by the off handed way they’re presented, as if these are just normal things that one does with their time.
I love the idea that what Zinggl has created is a sentient liquid, something that can leech through the ground, infecting anything it comes into contact with. Much like Vonnegut’s Ice-9, anything that this nefarious substance touches will be changed forever, and there is no way to return it to its natural form. No matter how innocent or undeserving, the receiver will always be contaminated. There is no escape and no cure. It’s solvent to both body and soul.
What Doesn’t Work
The voiceover of Jon Gries as Gunner could sometimes be a bit flat, not always reacting well to what was going on around him. This took me out of the film a few times. Although I realize that the countryside rambling and long-winded soliloquies were there to show Gunner’s state of mind, they could be a bit boring. Sometimes realism is not as entertaining as one might hope.
Final Thoughts
It’s obvious that Solvent is a very personal film for Grenzfurthner. The photos of his grandfather and the treasure hunt through his family’s actual abandoned farmhouse are a love letter to the filmmaker’s heritage, despite the fact that he made his affable familial patriarch into a antisemitic psychopath bent on eternal life in any form. The secondary characters are darkly funny and entertaining, proving to be an uneasy break away from Gunner’s increasing insanity. The multiple layers and subtext in Solvent alone make it worth a watch, and adding the bizarre visuals, creepy locations and contagious psychosis are the icing on the cake.
