Solvent (2024) Movie Review: There's Something Deeply Disturbing In The Water (2024)

A few minutes into Johannes Grenzfurthner’s “Solvent,” we are privy to a dilapidated Austrian farmhouse belonging to one Wolfgang Zinggl, who disappeared at the age of 94 under mysterious circumstances. This mission to overturn the abandoned house for clues is presented as a faux-documentary shot by combat veteran Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries, of “Lost” and “White Lotus” fame), who specializes in “tracking hidden and potentially fragile goods.”

However, the unblemished truth about Zinggl’s life is laid bare as Holbrook and his team comb through the mountains of old furniture, documents, memorabilia, and knick-knacks sprawled throughout the crumbling, lived-in space. As Zinggl’s grandson, Ernst Bartholdi (Grenzfurthner), and Polish academic historian, Krystyna (Aleksandra Cwen) explain, the old man used to be a high-ranking Nazi who was stationed at the Chełmno extermination camp, and actively helped engineer the horrors that unfolded there. Something about the farmhouse, framed as a disintegrating edifice that solidifies the horrific nature of Zinggl’s past, somehow feels all too real. That is because it is.

Grenzfurthner is no stranger to confronting horrors — both real and imagined — head-on, and his “Solvent” is a sort of spiritual successor to “Masking Threshold” and “Razzennest,” forming an unforgettable trifecta. The Zinggl house is not an elaborately crafted setpiece, but a real space belonging to the director’s grandfather, Otto Zucker, whose real-life archival footage represents the missing Zinggl. “Yeah, it is authentic. Not with a million dollars you could build something like this. It would not look like that,” Grenzfurthner stated in an interview. And he is absolutely right, as a staged version of the Zinggl house could never capture the haunting authenticity of these shots, allowing the fabricated, dramatized embellishments to take a life of their own.

The chaotic, frenetic Holbrook POV becomes even more frantic as the narrative progresses, the turning point being the discovery of a pipe jutting out of the basement floor, which becomes the source of all horrors. This concept feels bonkers even on paper, and perhaps, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the absurd, surreal nature of the situation would have veered into silliness devoid of gravitas.

However, Grenzfurthner knows how to leverage such an object as a receptacle of past horrors that bleed into the present, holding a bottomless pit of water — the most rudimentary and universal solvent — that is now a wellspring of death, destruction, and decay. Before the group can make sense of this, a terrible tragedy occurs, propelling Holbrook on a one-way journey that forces him to reckon with the evil embedded into the fabric of human existence.

Everything I’ve written so far might pin “Solvent” as a somber, didactic film. It is anything but. Humor trickles down the crevices of this astoundingly layered work to grant us relief and discomfort, the tint of the darkly funny bits changing ever so quickly. That does not mean that Grenzfurthner skirts around the core subject matter, as he is refreshingly honest and upfront, presenting present attitudes about World War II and the people involved in it, with a scathing edge.

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