I’m thrilled to report that we have now reached the “black-and-white historical dramas starring Sandra Hüller portion of this year’s New York Film Festival. I have been a big fan of Hüller’s since her hilarious, heartbreaking turn in Maren Ade’s 2016 father-daughter comedy Toni Erdmann; her performance of “The Greatest Love of All” is one of my favorite scenes in any film from this century. In the decade since I first saw that film—at NYFF54, coincidentally—I have continued to be impressed by the incredible authenticity she has showcased in films ranging from In the Aisles to Sisi & I, The Zone of Interest to (especially) Anatomy of a Fall.
Fortunately for us, 2026 is a four-film year for Hüller, with starring roles in Rose and Fatherland joining supporting turns in Project Hail Mary and Digger. Rose tells the story of a woman soldier, masquerading as a man, who arrives in a small village to claim an inheritance after serving in the Thirty Years’ War. Fatherland is another father-daughter tale, albeit not quite in the realm of Toni Erdmann; Hüller plays the actress and writer Erika Mann, reluctantly escorting her Nobel laureate father Thomas through West and East Germany in the years following World War II. Needless to say, it’s no surprise that both films feature fantastic performances from Hüller.
Rose (Markus Schleinzer)
Austria’s submission for Best International Film at the upcoming Academy Awards, Rose opens with the arrival of an enigmatic soldier (Hüller) in a small German village at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The soldier’s face is marked by a long scar where a bullet ripped through his cheek; he wears the bullet on a chain around his neck and often sucks on it thoughtfully, as though it were a particularly stubborn piece of hard candy that refuses to dissolve. The soldier claims to be the long-lost heir of a local estate, and he has the documents to prove it. Despite their initial reluctance, the villagers allow him to take charge of the farm, and it thrives under his dedicated care.
As time passes, the soldier is offered Suzanna (Caro Braun), the eldest daughter of another farmer, as a wife. He accepts her, but stalls consummating the marriage as long as possible for reasons that are obvious to the audience, but not so to the villagers. For the soldier is a woman, named Rose, who has been living as a man for years…complete with a makeshift strap-on. Naturally, when Suzanna announces that she is pregnant, Rose has more than a few questions about where the baby came from, questions that must remain unanswered if her true identity is to be kept secret. But an accident on the farm threatens to destroy everything Rose and Suzanna have built together: most significantly, lives of their own, out from under the thumbs of men.
Directed by Markus Schleinzer from a script he co-wrote with Alexander Brom, Rose is not based on the life story of any one real woman; rather, its protagonist is an amalgam of various women who disguised themselves as men throughout history. But that doesn’t mean it rings any less true when Rose, in response to being asked why she chose to pretend to be a man, simply says, “There is more freedom in trousers, and they are just a bit of cloth, so I put them on.” Or when Rose reminds Suzanna of what a woman must endure in such a harsh, patriarchal world, noting, “You don’t belong to yourself.”
The film is shot in a hazy, low-contrast black-and-white (really, it’s more a dark-grey-and-light-grey), courtesy of cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz, that gives it an appropriately murky atmosphere. At the center of it all is Hüller, who moves through the film with the posture of someone so long-practiced in their disguise that it has become more of a second skin; it is the way she acts, much more than the way she looks, that makes it believable that she could trick an entire village into believing she is a man. When the truth finally begins to dawn on the villagers, they demand that Rose prove her gender to them by dropping her pants; her response is a fiery speech in which she demands no less from them in return. Rose’s righteous rage almost manages to mask her desperation, but a sliver of it shines through. In that moment, both she and the audience realize that this is the beginning of the end, and all she can do is try and stave off the inevitable as long as possible. It’s perhaps the most powerful moment in a phenomenal performance, and one that should play well on For Your Consideration reels.
Rose relies heavily—perhaps a bit too heavily—on voiceover narration by Marisa Growaldt, likely because these are the kinds of characters who are of very few words. The narration gives you the feeling you’re watching a fable unfold on screen, albeit a cautionary one. For Rose is also incredibly bleak—in the second half of the film, almost relentlessly so. Given the time period and subject matter, this is to be expected; however, expecting it doesn’t make it any easier to watch, especially as a woman in a world that hasn’t really progressed that far from those days of suspicion and intolerance and feels increasingly susceptible to ideas of what a woman’s role is that are straight out of the seventeenth century. By the time the closing credits rolled, I was left feeling haunted by the ghosts of women like Rose, both past and present: women who have wanted a little more freedom than men have been willing to share with us.
Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski)
Paweł Pawlikowski previously explored the battered landscape of post-World War II Europe in Ida, the story of a Polish novice nun who discovers her parents were Jewish, and Cold War, a sprawling romance, loosely inspired by the lives of Pawlikowski’s parents, that criss-crosses the Iron Curtain before coming to a bittersweet conclusion. Both of those films centered upon his native Poland; his latest, Fatherland, turns its gaze towards Germany at a time in which two different versions of that country were emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich.
Neither West nor East Germany feels like home to acclaimed writer Thomas Mann and his family; the Germany they knew and loved was demolished by the Nazis and can never rise again. This loss of heimat, the place where one truly belongs, is just one source of grief for Thomas (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter, Erika (Hüller), who are visiting from the United States for the first time since the war. The reason? Thomas will be receiving the Goethe Prize, twice: once in West Germany, in Frankfurt, then again in East Germany, in Weimar. The multilingual, multitalented Erika is escorting him and serving as his translator.
As Thomas and Erika traverse the divided nation, they are nursing another grief, one that for Erika may be the deepest of all: the recent death by suicide of her brother, the writer Klaus Mann (August Diehl), the family member with whom she was closest. In the opening scene of Fatherland, Klaus bitterly complains about the state of the world while on the phone with Erika: “Which side are you on, Stalin or Mickey Mouse…I don’t believe in anything anymore.” Erika tries to convince Klaus to join her and their father on the trip, but to no avail. Yet his ghost haunts every moment of the Manns’ trip and every frame of Fatherland. Diehl’s performance is brief but devastating, a heartrending depiction of just one of the many individuals broken beyond repair by the trauma of the war and the realization that they could never truly go home again.
At a reception in West Germany, Erika has a heated exchange with her ex-husband (and Klaus’s ex-lover), the actor Gustaf Gründgens (Joachim Meyerhoff), who implies that only Erika’s immense privilege as the daughter of a famous author enabled her to flee Germany and look down on those like himself who stayed behind to work under the Nazis. And he’s not the only one: milling all around them are people who’ve managed to wash their hands of wartime activities thanks to denazification—a process Erika Mann was critical of, for good reason. Meanwhile, in East Germany, the Manns encounter old friends who urge them to lend their artistic talents to the building of the new nation. But there are unpleasant echoes of the past to be heard there, too. Things change, but they also stay the same, with Marcin Masecki’s discordant score periodically reminding us that all is not right in this world.
Like Ida and Cold War, Fatherland is captured in crisp, high-contrast black-and-white by Pawlikowski’s regular cinematographer, Łukasz Żal. The film was shot on location in the various European locales where it takes place, and every image looks and feels precisely crafted. The story is told efficiently, in at a mere 82 minutes; the script, co-written by Pawlikowski and Babylon Berlin co-creator Hendrik Handloegten, assumes the audience has enough knowledge of the post-war European history and culture (not to mention, the Mann family and their tangled relationships) to get by without too much handholding. Yet this is the rare movie that I wish could have been longer, as I could have happily watched an entire miniseries about these characters in these places at this time.
Zischler gives Thomas Mann an appropriate amount of gravitas as well as egotism; he is the prototypical great man, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is always a great father, as seen when Erika accuses him of being more concerned with his legacy than with his family. Meanwhile, Hüller capably handles the challenge of portraying a strong woman in one of the weakest moments of her life, as Erika mourns her brother and closest friend privately while playing the dutiful daughter and famed cultural figure publicly. But she occasionally breaks down and reveals her vulnerability, such as when she opens a hotel window to scream obscenities at people singing fascist songs outside before dissolving into sobs.
Fatherland culminates in a final scene of immense beauty, set in a bombed-out church, that cannot fail to move you; it might not be Hüller singing Whitney Houston, but it’s one of my top cinematic moments of this year. Few films twice as long could hope to have the same lasting impact on the viewer.
Rose and Fatherland are screening in the Main Slate at the 64th New York Film Festival, which runs from September 25 to October 12, 2026.
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