With body horror thriller feature, Solvent, director and co-writer Johannes Grenzfurthner takes us down a hole into a deep well of evil. In found-footage style, this dramatized faux documentary begins with a team of experts searching for Nazi documents in a moldering Austrian farmhouse. They are suited up in full hazmat to avoid any contaminants. American expat Gunner S. Holbrook (Jon Gries) is the subject matter expert due to his experience recovering fragile items. Holbrook is also a combat veteran who suffers from PTSD. The team tears the house apart and comes up with nothing.
The property owner, Ernst Bartholdi (Grenzfurthner), guides them through his grandfather’s house. His grandfather was Wolfgang Zinggl (played via archival footage by Otto Zucker, Grenzfurthner’s real grandfather). The reason the home is of interest is that Zinggl was a Nazi soldier, purported to have historically significant documentation hidden in the house. To deepen the mystery, Zinggl disappeared mysteriously, and a body was never found.
A neighboring farmer tells them there is an underground bunker next to the main property, and when they delve into it, they discover a metal pipe protruding up. Using a sewer camera, they peer into the pipe, and the situation begins to unravel dramatically. Team lead Krystyna Szczepanska (Aleksandra Cwen) examines the pipe but suffers some sort of breakdown when she touches it. In her haste to escape the bunker, she shoves Cornelia Dunzinger (Jasmin Hagendorfer) off a ramp, and Dunzinger dies in the fall. The project shuts down after the tragedy, but Holbrook burns bright with an obsession to know what happened. He returns on his own to further explore the mystery. As he falls under the influence of whatever evil lies beneath, his body begins to transform … seeming to liquefy, as if living putrefaction was occurring. Visions of the horrors of the holocaust accompany Holbrook’s (literal) disintegration.
“…found-footage style faux documentary begins with a team of experts searching for Nazi documents…”
Grenzfurthner has expanded his vision here, having explored this territory before in his previous diaries of descents into madness: Masking Threshold and Razzennest. He mentions this connection in his director’s statement: “Though not directly linked in plot, “Solvent” is the spiritual successor to “Masking Threshold” (2021) and “Razzennest” (2022), forming a trilogy bound by a shared spirit. These films are kindred works, forbidden siblings.”
Solvent takes us to the darkness of humanity’s most wicked impulses flowing just beneath us, poisoning the water table. Along with the found footage, there are many shots of close-up unidentifiable, often grotesque, organic material. Some of it looks like a colonoscopy or endoscopy. Some of it could be a trip through a septic tank. It all serves to create and deepen a mood of growing spiritual decay. Lovecraft explored the notion that horror and madness could render physical changes, and this is delightfully pursued as well.
"…down a hole into a deep well of evil. "
