MUBI Unveils Trailer for 'Rose', Austria's Oscar Entry Starring Sandra Hüller

MUBI has released the first trailer and poster for Rose, Markus Schleinzer's Seventeenth-century drama that won Sandra Hüller the Berlinale Silver Bear and now serves as Austria's official entry to the 99th Academy Awards. The film opens in select U.S. theaters beginning December 11.

Hüller, one of the most in-demand European actors of the past two years, plays the title role: a war veteran presenting as a man in order to survive. Her performance in Rose may prove her strongest of the year.

The official synopsis sets the scene: "Amidst the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, somewhere in Germany, a mysterious soldier appears in a secluded protestant village. Small and quiet, his face disfigured by a scar, this stranger declares himself the heir of a long-abandoned farmstead and produces a document to support his claim to the suspicious villagers. With time, he overcomes their doubts and shows himself to be a hard-working, God-fearing man, becoming part of the community in a quest for acceptance made up of impossible deceit. The true and twisted tale of a deceiver of land and folk, who, defying her birth as a woman, comported herself as a man and committed many a wicked deed."

Rory O'Connor, reviewing the film for The Film Stage at its Berlinale premiere, praised Schleinzer's command of period texture. "If the credibility of period filmmaking can be measured by whether the audience is able to imagine a character scrolling on an iPhone, Markus Schleinzer deserves recognition for his contributions to the genre," O'Connor wrote. "The Austrian director's latest, a macabre, pseudo-folktale titled Rose, is set in 17th-century Germany and looks as if it was shot there, too."

O'Connor describes the film's opening: after introductory narration "read with dubious cheer by Marisa Growaldt," viewers meet Hüller's character "just as she encounters a group of villagers near the plot of land she's come to falsely claim." The scene unfolds at night, lit only by torch fire — "all the better to show the asymmetries of the faces and establish the textures and potential threats of Rose's world."

The character has lived as a man for years. "There is more freedom in trousers," she explains at one point in the film — a line that distills the deceptions at the story's core.

Schleinzer, an Austrian director and longtime casting director, has built the film as what O'Connor calls "something from another era," a claim the trailer's firelit frames and stark period detail appear to bear out.

With its December 11 U.S. release, Rose enters the awards season as Austria's candidate in the Best International Feature race for the 99th Academy Awards — and gives American audiences their first chance to judge Hüller's Silver Bear-winning turn on a big screen.