At BiffBamPop.com, the Gutter’s own Sachin Hingoo watches Johannes Grenzfurthner’s Solvent (Austria, 2024). “One of the reasons I love horror is its unique ability to distill complex political ideas and emotions into what is, on the surface, a simple scary story. In much the same way that comedies disarm you with a laugh, horror puts you on your guard from ghosts or that weird shadow in one corner of the room, only to blindside you from the other. 

It feels odd to be writing about the latest film from Austrian director Johannes Grenzfurthner–one might call it the finale in his pseudo-trilogy of features after Masking Threshold and Razzennest–today in particular. Only days removed from the real-life Austrian election in which a far-right party (the Freedom Party, or FPO) and it’s leader Herbert Kickl becomes the latest of it’s type in Europe to win a majority of votes, it makes Grenzfurthner seem scarily prescient to be thinking about a film about Nazi atrocities and the revelation that modern-day sociopolitical acts and events are far less removed from historical ones than one might assume.”

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