‘Rose’ Review: Sandra Hüller Commands the Screen in Gender-Bending Period Piece with a Towering, Career-High Performance [A-] Berlinale

Smoke hangs heavy over the scorched earth. In the distance, cannon fire rumbles like the aftershocks of a catastrophe that has long since occurred and yet refuses to end. Skeletons bleach between barren trees. A single flute melody pierces the silence. With only a handful of images, Rose establishes a world so stark that the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War becomes not merely visible but physically tangible. The air feels cold, the soil exhausted, history itself bruised. And out of this landscape steps a small and scarred soldier. A narrator reveals early what the village will not: this “man” is a woman who has put on trousers to secure a future otherwise denied to her.

Austrian director Markus Schleinzer continues his exploration of concealed identities with striking formal rigor. Shot in high contrast black and white by Gerald Kerkletz, Rose rejects any trace of historical romanticism. There is no candlelit warmth and no pastoral nostalgia, only rigid compositions and austere tableaux in which faces seem carved from stone. The severity feels almost museal, yet it is purposeful. Within these strict frames, themes of economic dependency, patriarchal authority and social constraint emerge with bracing clarity. The character arrives as the supposed heir to an abandoned farm, armed with a letter that legitimizes her claim. The villagers are wary, but labor is needed. Only the narrator and the audience know her secret and from this imbalance the film draws its quiet tension, while every single gesture carries risk. When Rose remarks that there is ‘more freedom in trousers’, it resonates as a thesis. In this world, clothing determines ownership and survival. By putting them on, she shifts the course of her life. 

Schleinzer sidesteps melodrama to examine the systems that govern his world, inheritance, labor, and rigid gender codes, while an off screen narrator gives the film the measured cadence of a ballad. Everything subtly shifts once her love interest Suzanna enters the frame. Played with quiet strength by Caro Braun, Suzanna is first introduced as property, married off to Rose to secure land and lineage, a union rooted in strategy rather than affection. And within this arrangement, something begins to change. What starts as necessity evolves into fragile intimacy, their queerness never announced but quietly embodied in lingering glances and charged silences that transform calculation into complicity. The restraint of its storytelling can create distance, yet it turns the 17th century into a mirror of the present, where queerness and self determination are not abstract ideas but strategies of survival, lived by Rose without the vocabulary to name them.

Without a doubt, Rose stands and falls with Sandra Hüller. It is her performance that not only anchors the material but elevates it, giving the film a gravity it might otherwise struggle to sustain. What could have remained an austere historical exercise becomes urgent and deeply human because of her astonishing control and depth. Hüller is nothing short of seismic. And what’s most important, she does not play a man. She plays a woman who must flawlessly perform manhood and that distinction is everything. Her shoulders hover slightly raised, as if bracing for exposure. Her steps are measured, her voice low but never parodic. She navigates subtle tonal shifts that delineate gender performance without exaggeration. What we witness is not imitation but compression, a life lived in permanent self regulation. Every glance carries danger. Every breath feels earned.

At first, Rose is withdrawn and abrasive, offering no easy identification. The audience must work toward her, just as she binds her chest each morning, straps on padding, laces heavy boots, and conceals herself behind scars. Yet vulnerability flickers through the armor. A tremor in the hand. A glance that lingers too long. A deformed pistol bullet pressed between her teeth in moments of inner strain. Trauma and empowerment entwined. It is this precision, this refusal of excess, that lifts the film from rigorous concept to something truly formidable. Devastating in its restraint. 

When Hüller is silent, the silence vibrates. When she speaks, it cuts. Every actor should be afraid of her: Only few others possess her precision and range, and once she locks into one of those razor sharp monologues, recalling the ferocity of her Oscar-nominated turn in Anatomy of a Fall, the scene is unequivocally hers. Others do not diminish; they orbit. It’s game over the moment she begins. She commands through restraint, embodying fear, discipline, longing, and power without spectacle. Having secured her place on the international stage, Hüller could easily have turned her back on German language cinema. That she instead commits to a rigorously defined genre film driven by moral inquiry and narrative integrity speaks volumes. Her choices are guided not by prestige or market logic, but by conviction. Sandra Hüller doesn’t chase greatness. She defines it.

And ultimately by the end, Rose reveals itself as more than a tale of disguise or survival. It becomes a meditation on the perilous act of claiming space in a world structured to deny it. When Sandra Hüller wraps herself in the costume of masculinity, she does more than inhabit a role. She turns defiance into freedom. In a world that denies women ownership and authority, the finest man here is a woman who understands that survival can begin with the radical act of putting on a pair of trousers.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where Rose had its World Premiere in the Competition.