As Solvent commences, we’re dropped into a GoPro’s eye view on the setup of Gunner S. Holbrook (voiced by Jon Gries) and his private recovery team, including historian and Holbrook’s former lover, Krystyna Szczepanska (Aleksandra Cwen). The team is tasked with investigating the farmhouse of Wolfgang Zinggl, a former SS officer who disappeared without a trace some years earlier, with his grandson along for the ride (Grenzfurthner himself). There are spooky doings afoot, and after happening upon a mysterious pipe, Krystyna is gripped by mania and causes the death of one of the crew. Some months later, Holbrook begins to venture back into the farmhouse against the wishes of everyone involved, including said grandson and Zinggl’s former neighbor. We track Holbrook as he begins to be gripped by voices and visions of the farmhouse’s Nazi past as his world collapses around him.
Now, if you’re reading this thinking “Fuck me if that doesn’t sound like a heavy-handed metaphor for the reemergence of fascism in contemporary Europe,” then yes, you’re right. Solvent is by no means a film that keeps its cards close to its chest. There’s not a second where you are in doubt as to what the film is trying to say, such is its broadness and insistence on actively bellowing its points at all times. Subtlety doesn’t so much take a backseat as gets left at home to sit by the phone like the girl from Audition waiting for Mike Leigh to phone back. While there are vague nods toward something more precise, the film’s thematic core is basically taking “there’s something in the water” as a phrase and hammering it as long and hard as it can. The whole thing feels well-worn and a touch route one, and for a filmmaker who has focused on technology so much throughout their career, very little is done with the film’s POV device. And any nods toward exploring it further are never manifested as any more than the most cursory of glances, all in favor of circling a point that had said most of what it had to by the end of the prologue.
In fairness, honking and parping the arrival of your themes like this isn’t an issue in and of itself, and there’s a strange tendency in contemporary criticism to judge a film exclusively on the point that it’s making. But when you’re upending the film’s momentum every five minutes just to remind us what the point is, well that creates problems. If you’re going to go this broad with the narrative, you can tell there’s a lot of pressure on the telling, and Solvent’s essential issue is that it’s a comedically infused horror film that’s neither frightening nor funny enough. Beyond a few wince-inducing bits of grue and Cwen’s enjoyably ripe vocal performance, there’s never really any point where its jokes or scares connect, both too telegraphed to be really effective. Without them, all that’s left is a lot of circling the drain, waiting for a twist or tonal shift that never comes.
If you look at a film like Elliot Goldner’s The Borderlands, a similar (and better) film that uses found footage and an investigation into an old building as a springboard for an examination of the weight of history on the present, then it becomes apparent why it succeeds and Solvent ultimately does not. The calculus isn’t complex: it’s simply more successful at being both frightening and funny, most of which stems from characters who are rounded and better realized, whereas Holbrook never emerges as a character beyond a list of things he has done or that have happened to him. Still, it’s hard to take any profound issue with the film, and like all Grenzfurthner’s works, it’s clearly a labor of love (more so when acknowledging a fact about the film’s production, which is in effect a spoiler that won’t be revealed here). But it’s too tough to shake that Solvent is ultimately a flawed film that is so set upon delivering a single point that it upends its chances of working in any other way. It’s one thing to use genre film as a Trojan horse for political ideas, but that genre cannot just be window dressing — it needs to be handled with the kind of deftness of touch that anyone involved in more straightforward takes on said genres employs. Grenzfurthner has shown this touch before, but it too often is missing in Solvent.
DIRECTOR: Johannes Grenzfurthner; CAST: Jon Gries, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Roland Gratzer, Aleksandra Cwen; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; STREAMING: October 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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