Rose (2026) Movie Review: Sandra Hüller's Astonishing Gender Performance Elevates a Rigorously Crafted Period Masterpiece

Rose is a 2026 Austrian-German historical drama directed and co-written by Markus Schleinzer, with Alexander Brom sharing screenplay credit. Produced by Schubert Film, ROW Pictures, and Walker & Worm Film, the film stars Sandra Hüller in the lead role, alongside Caro Braun, Marisa Growaldt, Godehard Giese, Robert Gwisdek, and Sven-Eric Bechtolf. Set in 17th-century rural Germany in the smoldering aftermath of the Thirty Years' War, the story follows a female soldier who assumes a dead comrade's male identity to claim an inheritance and carve out a livable existence in a world that has no place for women who want more. The film had its world premiere on February 15, 2026, at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival in Competition, with a theatrical release scheduled in Austria on April 17 via Filmladen Filmverleih and in Germany on April 30 via Piffl Medien.

What makes Rose worth your attention goes beyond its period setting or its quietly subversive premise. This is Schleinzer's third feature, and it represents the most accessible entry point into his rigorous, confrontational filmmaking style. Coming eight years after Angelo, Schleinzer has returned to the territory of hidden identities and historical marginalization, this time drawing on hundreds of documented real-life accounts of women who passed as men across early modern Europe. The result is a film that uses the 17th century as a lens to examine pressures and constraints that feel startlingly immediate today.

Story and Screenplay: A Folk Tragedy Built on Devastating Simplicity

Schleinzer and Brom structure Rose with the measured cadence of a ballad, narrated by Marisa Growaldt in an almost archival, detached voice that lends the film the feeling of a rediscovered historical document. This omniscient narrator device is one of the screenplay's most effective choices, creating distance that paradoxically draws us closer to the protagonist. We know what the villagers do not, and that gap between audience knowledge and in-story ignorance becomes the source of a quiet, sustained tension that never fully releases until the film's final reckoning.

The narrative is linear and deliberately unadorned. Rose arrives in a Protestant village, claims a neglected farmstead using forged inheritance papers, earns the community's trust through hard work and a bear-killing that becomes local legend, and eventually agrees to an arranged marriage with Suzanna, the eldest daughter of a neighboring landowner, as part of a land deal. There is a dark comedy embedded in the escalating impossibility of this situation, a quality Schleinzer handles with considerable skill. Whether Rose is attempting to navigate a wedding night, improvising an astonishing workaround for the expected consummation, or managing the village's growing impatience for an heir, the script allows absurdity and pathos to coexist without one undermining the other.

Where the screenplay occasionally feels constrained is in its deliberate refusal to look outside of Rose's immediate orbit. Supporting characters, particularly Suzanna before her late-film revelation, are drawn with broad strokes that serve the narrative thesis more than they serve the story. The thematic argument, that gender is performance and the performance of masculinity is simply a survival strategy in a world that offers women nothing, is hammered with clarity but at the cost of some narrative complexity. Schleinzer is so confident in his formal approach that the film rarely second-guesses itself, which is both a strength and an occasional limitation. Still, within its 94-minute frame, the screenplay accomplishes something genuinely difficult: it makes you root fiercely for someone who is, by any conventional measure, perpetrating an elaborate and consequential deception.

Acting and Characters: Hüller Rewrites What a Star Performance Can Be

Sandra Hüller's work here is nothing short of extraordinary. Coming off her Oscar-nominated performance in Anatomy of a Fall and her chilling turn in The Zone of Interest, Hüller had already secured her place among the finest actors working today. Rose demands something different from her, and she delivers it with a precision that makes the performance look effortless even as you sense the immense discipline underneath. She does not play a man. She plays a woman who has spent years becoming an airtight imitation of one, and the distinction matters enormously. Her posture carries just enough tension, her voice pitches low without parody, her gait is deliberate. The physical performance is built around compression, the compression of a full interior life into the smallest possible external signals.

The character of Rose is initially remote, almost abrasive in her guardedness, and the film earns the warmth that slowly bleeds through her armor. A habit of chewing on a flattened bullet worn around her neck as a memento of her near-fatal wound becomes a recurring gesture that communicates more than pages of dialogue could. When Hüller goes still, the stillness is electric. When she occasionally breaks, in a moment of raging frustration that arrives late in the film, it lands with the force of something that has been building for years. It is a performance that asks you to work toward the character, and the effort is richly rewarded.

Caro Braun's Suzanna initially seems like a functional narrative device, the unwitting wife, a prop in Rose's increasingly elaborate scheme. Braun does more with the role than the writing initially offers, finding real warmth and a dry, unshowy humor in Suzanna's patient domesticity. When the truth of Rose's identity is revealed to her, Braun handles the pivot beautifully. Suzanna's response is not what you expect, and Braun plays the recalibration with intelligence and quiet grace, transforming what might have been a supporting role into a genuinely touching portrait of a woman finding her own form of agency within an impossible situation. The cautious tenderness that develops between the two leads in the film's second half is the emotional core of Rose, understated but genuinely moving.

Direction and Technical Aspects: Austere Mastery in Black and White

Schleinzer's visual approach, developed with cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz, his regular collaborator, strips the 17th-century setting of any lingering romanticism. Shot in a high-contrast black and white that recalls the austere rigor of Carl Theodor Dreyer and the social severity of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, the film constructs its frames like paintings, deliberately composed and held, rarely permitting the camera to indulge in movement. Faces look carved from stone. Landscapes stretch out in all their exhausted, post-war desolation. There is no candlelight warmth, no pastoral softness. The world Rose inhabits is one of labor, survival, and watchfulness, and every shot communicates that.

This visual severity is purposeful rather than decorative. By refusing aesthetic comfort, Schleinzer forces the audience into the same posture as his protagonist: alert, unrelaxed, perpetually conscious of what might be observed. The production design by Olivier Meidinger, constructed largely from scratch on locations in Germany's Harz region and Austria, is remarkable in its lived-in authenticity. Every timber beam, every scuffed boot, every costume element looks genuinely excavated from the period rather than reproduced. The casting, which blends seasoned professional actors with nonprofessionals, maintains the same commitment to historical plausibility, and there is not a single anachronistic face or body language tic to pull you out of the fiction.

Editor Hansjörg Weißbrich, known for his work on September 5, shapes Rose into a lean 93 minutes with a rigorous economy that mirrors the screenplay's own no-filler ethos. The film never lingers on a scene longer than necessary, and the pacing has a brisk confidence that keeps the narrative's more measured passages from feeling slow. Schleinzer's background as a casting director for Haneke, Jessica Hausner, and Ulrich Seidl is evident throughout, not only in the ensemble's authenticity but in the overall discipline of the filmmaking, which treats every element of the production as a contributing argument rather than mere decoration.

Trailer Rose (2026)

Music and Atmosphere: Sparse Sound That Carries Everything

The film's score is provided by singer-songwriter Tara Nome Doyle, and the decision to build the entire sonic landscape around a capella vocals is one of Rose's most quietly radical choices. Doyle's high, mournful strains appear sparingly, surfacing at moments of particular emotional weight with an anguish that feels ancient and present simultaneously. Where a conventional period score would wrap the story in atmospheric safety, Doyle's music leaves the air dangerously clear, amplifying rather than cushioning the film's emotional blows.

The overall sound design reinforces the period's austerity. Wind across open fields, the crack of a military musket, the ambient sounds of agricultural labor, these are the textures that make up Rose's sonic world, and they are deployed with the same careful intention as the visual compositions. The film's atmosphere is one of sustained precariousness, the feeling that any given moment could tip into exposure and catastrophe. This tension is maintained not through dramatic scoring but through absence, through silence and sparse acoustic presence that keeps the audience in a state of low, constant unease. It is a film you feel as much as watch, and its sound choices are central to that effect.

Strengths and Weaknesses

What works:

• Sandra Hüller's performance is a career landmark, built on physical precision, emotional restraint, and an astonishing ability to communicate interior states without telegraphing them.
• The black-and-white cinematography by Gerald Kerkletz is consistently striking, creating compositions that function as visual arguments about power, constraint, and exposure.
• Caro Braun's Suzanna provides unexpected emotional depth and welcome moments of unforced comedy that balance the film's austerity.
• Tara Nome Doyle's a capella score is a distinctive, bold choice that enhances rather than explains the film's emotional register.
• The production and costume design achieves a level of historical authenticity that grounds the story's more provocative elements.
• The narrator device effectively creates dramatic irony without undermining the protagonist's opacity.
• The film's 94-minute running time demonstrates impressive efficiency, packing considerable thematic and emotional weight into a compact structure.

What doesn't work:

• Supporting characters, particularly in the first act, function more as social obstacles than as fully realized people, which limits the world-building.
• The screenplay's commitment to thematic clarity occasionally sacrifices narrative ambiguity, making the film's argument feel over-stated in a handful of scenes.
• Scenes that don't include Hüller can feel like holding patterns rather than active contributions to the story, a consequence of the film's single-protagonist focus.
• Audiences expecting conventional period drama pacing or emotional catharsis may find the film's deliberate restraint frustrating rather than rewarding.

Final Verdict: A Finely Calibrated Folk Tragedy That Belongs in the Year's Best

Rating: 8/10

Rose earns its 8-out-of-10-star rating by excelling in almost every craft dimension while maintaining an admirable refusal to be anything other than exactly what it intends. It is not quite a masterpiece in the transcendent sense, but it is so thoroughly and confidently made that its limitations feel like principled choices rather than failures. This is a film that knows precisely what it wants to do and does it with remarkable control.

Viewers who will find the most in Rose are those drawn to formally rigorous European cinema, fans of Hüller's previous work who want to watch her tackle genuinely demanding material, and anyone interested in how historical fiction can illuminate contemporary questions about gender, survival, and the performance of identity. It pairs naturally in conversation with films like The White Ribbon, Sworn Virgin, and even certain strands of frontier American cinema, and it will reward viewers who bring patience and a willingness to meet the film on its own austere terms.

Those looking for emotional release, narrative propulsion, or conventional period-drama satisfactions should be aware that Rose operates at a cooler temperature. The film's emotional impact is real but cumulative rather than immediate, the kind that settles into you fully only after the credits have run. It is not a film that wears its heart visibly. For the right audience, that restraint is precisely the point, and the experience of watching Hüller carry this story, bullet between her teeth, expression unreadable, defying a world that offers her nothing, is one of the most compelling things on screen in 2026.

Rose premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 15, 2026. Austrian theatrical release: April 17, 2026 (Filmladen Filmverleih). German theatrical release: April 30, 2026 (Piffl Medien). Language: German. Runtime: 94 minutes.