Off to the red house, that’s what the small group of soldiers around ex-lieutenant Peter Perg says, worn-out, ragged figures who have just made their way to the capital, to Vienna. Back from the First World War, in the early twenties, after a few years in Russian captivity. The ride on the Danube boat into the city leads through an empty landscape. The former empire has shrunk to a small, meaningless state in the middle of Europe. A world in which nothing is as it used to be. And Perg, the returnees, he himself uses this pathetic phrase, is no longer who he went to war as. The old caste of officers and nobles now suspect him of being a Bolshevik. It is completely shabby, no longer able to act, too bland even to commit suicide.
The red house has one last tantalizing echo of the old days, but it’s not a brothel, it’s Vienna’s homeless shelter. Only Perg has a real home to which he can withdraw, an apartment, but the wife and daughter are not waiting for him there, as the caretaker explains to him. You moved outside the city to Gumpoldskirchen. Perg once went to war for God, Emperor, Fatherland, he left his family, betrayed his role as father, like the great returnees from myth and history, from Odysseus to the prodigal son.
Anyone who came back with unharmed limbs now has roof damage
Vienna also looks ragged, a dark city conglomerate of shabby compactness, even the sky is greasy and dirty gray. The perfect object of a love-hate relationship, you know this mixture from the films of Erich von Stroheim: There is an incurable sadness about a loss – Stroheim’s Vienna is constructed in Hollywood, an imaginary object – and a tenderness that he feels for all those who have been battered or humiliated , Cherishes towards cripples. Police pathologist Theresa Körner explains to ex-colleague Perg that anyone who comes back from this war with good limbs has suffered severe roof damage. She slips out before she realizes how mean it sounds to him.
The cool Liv Lisa Fries is Dr. Körner, the impenetrable Murathan Muslu the returnees Perg, the two come together to investigate a gruesome series of murders, the first victim of which is also a returnees. The murderer left one thumb to one of the victims, all other fingers and toes were cut off. Another victim is eaten alive by nineteen rats. Perg is deeper into this case than he would like, the dead will haunt him into his dreams, in the empty apartment. The decay, the chaos, says Theresa, that could also prepare the ground for something new, she walks through this dark Vienna all in white, with a cap and a long white coat that look like an angel’s uniform.
The war returnee, who was once a commissioner, and the pathologist: Murathan Muslu and Liv Lisa Fries in “Hinterland”.
(Photo: Square One)
There is no real interaction in this film, no connection between people and the environment in which they move, the city is artificially inserted into the scenes with the help of blue screen technology, which are house fronts, bridges, churches, cafes and bathhouses crooked and crooked. The people in it are left alone, in an obsessive indifference (even when one soars into a liberating, obscene act on an altar).
One knows the feeling of the constructs of symbolism and surrealism, later they are compressed in the weird decors of the “Caligari” era. In the cinema, the rooms no longer provide the decor of the scenes as we know it from the theater, the buildings of the film architects intervene in the action, have a life of their own, set firmly established references in motion. Everything has to remain sketchy, wrote Lotte Eisner, who stayed very close to the cinema of the twenties, in her book “The demonic canvas”, “full of vibrating tension, an incessant fermentation has to seize objects and people”.
When he is examining a corpse with the other criminal investigators on the Danube quay, Peter Perg sees a few street boys lurking on the other bank. It’s only a quick look he throws at her, but there’s a strong sense of belonging to be discovered in it.
Backland, 2021 – Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky. Book: Robert Buchschwenter, Hanno Pinter, S. Ruzowitzky. Camera: Benedict Neuenfels. Editor: Britta Nahler. Music: Kyan Bayani. With: Murathan Muslu, Liv Lisa Fries, Max von der Groeben, Marc Limpach, Margarete Tiesel, Aaron Friesz, Stipe Erceg, Matthias Schweighöfer. SquareOne, 98 minutes.