The Wall' Movie Review

The Pitch, If There Even Is One

Most end-of-the-world movies want you to know what happened. The asteroid. The virus. The robots. The Wall refuses. The catastrophe just is. A woman wakes up, an invisible barrier surrounds her patch of Austrian mountains, the people on the other side appear to be frozen mid-action, and the film never bothers explaining a single thing about it.

This sounds insufferable on paper. In practice it's the opposite. Director Julian Pölsler shot the whole thing in his own backyard (the Austrian Alps, where he was actually born), and he holds the camera steady on his lead, Martina Gedeck, while she figures out how to keep herself, a dog, a cat, and a pregnant cow alive through an Alpine winter. That's the movie. That's also why people who watch it tend to remember it for years.

Why The Festival Crowd Lost Their Minds

The Wall premiered in the Panorama section at the 2012 Berlinale, and Austria submitted it as their official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. It didn't make the final shortlist, but the festival run was substantial, picking up multiple wins across European awards circuits and a Saturn Award nomination for Gedeck for Best Actress.

There's also the source material. Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel Die Wand is one of the most-loved Austrian novels of the 20th century, translated into seventeen languages, and treated by many readers as a foundational text of the German-language women's movement. For decades it was called unfilmable. People had tried. Everyone had failed. Pölsler, a longtime TV director making his theatrical debut, was the one who finally cracked it, and he did it by leaning into the book's interior voice rather than fighting it.

Martina Gedeck Is Doing Most Of The Heavy Lifting

If you've seen The Lives of Others (the film that won Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Oscars), you've seen Gedeck. She played the actress girlfriend caught between the playwright and the Stasi. She was also in The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Here she is the entire film. No co-stars to speak of after the first ten minutes. Just her, voiceover, and animals.

What she's doing is hard to describe without sounding like a press release, so try this. She's playing somebody who has stopped performing. Most lead performances are about expressing. Gedeck's whole job for two hours is to stop expressing and just exist on camera while chopping wood, milking a cow, walking up a hillside in the rain. The acting is in her face when she thinks nobody is watching, including the audience. By the time the cow Bella gives birth (a real birth, captured on camera), Gedeck has so fully merged with the role that you forget you're watching one.

Behind-The-Scenes Stuff Worth Knowing

Three things about the production that make the film read differently if you know them.

One. Pölsler shot The Wall across more than a year, starting summer 2010 and continuing through the seasons that followed, so the changing weather you see on screen is real. The summer green, the autumn slip, the snow piling up around the hunting lodge, all the same actual location, photographed across the calendar. Most films fake this. This one didn't.

Two. The dog playing Luchs, the loyal hound who becomes Gedeck's emotional anchor, was the director's own dog. Watch closely and you can see why. The animal isn't performing. It's just hanging out with people it knows.

Three. The cinematography is credited to nine different DPs (yes, nine, including Markus Fraunholz). Across that many cameras, across that much time, the film still feels visually unified, which is an achievement nobody talks about because it's invisible. The score is mostly silence, but when music does come in, it's Bach partitas played by the German violinist Julia Fischer. Worth knowing if you find yourself wondering who's playing.

Things To Watch For While You're In It

There's a moment where she spots a white crow sitting alone, ostracized by the murder of black crows around it. She watches it for a long time. The film never spells out what she's thinking. It doesn't need to.

Watch the way she handles the rifle the first time. She can't pull the trigger. Lynx gives her a look afterwards that's almost embarrassed for her. It's funny in a way the film isn't supposed to be funny.

Watch the night sky scenes. The Salzkammergut is dark enough at altitude that you get real stars, and the cinematographers shot them properly. Watch the wall itself, too. Pölsler made the smart choice of barely showing it, mostly suggesting it through Gedeck's mime-like work against an invisible surface, with the occasional shot using actual transparent material when the moment needs the impact.

What Doesn't Quite Land

Honest take. The voiceover does too much. Pölsler is so faithful to Haushofer's prose that he stays inside her head the entire runtime, and Variety's Boyd van Hoeij wasn't wrong when he called the film a "well-illustrated audiobook." There are stretches where the narration is telling you things the image is already showing you, and those are the moments the film deflates a little.

The ending also lands oddly. Without spoiling it, the film makes a tonal pivot in its last act that feels imported from a different, harsher movie, and The Hollywood Reporter's Neil Young called the shift "unsatisfyingly awkward." That criticism holds. If you're someone who needs an explanation for the wall, you won't get one. The film isn't interested.

Who Should Actually Watch This

If your favourite end-of-the-world movies are The Road, I Am Legend, or anything where the apocalypse eventually explains itself, skip The Wall. You'll be irritated.

If you can sit with a film that refuses to answer its own central question, and you want to watch one of the great German-language actresses of her generation carry a whole movie on her back through an Austrian winter, this is one of the best things hiding in your streaming queue. Slow, yes. Quiet, yes. But it stays. Long after faster, louder films have evaporated.