The Architecture of What Remains: Chiharu Shiota’s The Soul Trembles

Installation In Silence (2002/2026) detail. Chiharu Shiota's patient weaving with threads creates extraordinary visions that evoke at once our connections to each other and memory. This photo of her complex installation looks like an antique print. 
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Entering Chiharu Shiota’s The Soul Trembles is to enter a world after the departure of its inhabitants, though their absence has somehow become the room’s most palpable presence. Threads gather in the air like cobwebs in an abandoned house; dresses, chairs, shoes, and other ordinary objects persist as mute witnesses to lives no longer accessible. Yet this is not the desolation of a place emptied by time. It is the strange fullness of a place that remembers. At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where the exhibition opens its first North American presentation in autumn 2026, Shiota proposes an unsettling reversal: perhaps absence is not what remains when presence disappears, but the material through which presence continues to exist.

Spanning more than three decades of the Japanese artist’s practice, the exhibition, organized by the MMFA and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, gathers monumental thread installations, sculptures, drawings, performance videos, photographs, and documentation of her work for theatre, dance, and opera. Curated by Mami Kataoka, with Iris Amizlev overseeing the Montreal presentation, the survey traces an artistic life devoted to making the invisible apprehensible. Its central achievement, however, lies beyond retrospective completeness. Shiota’s work transforms the gallery into an anatomy of memory, where the architecture of a life is measured not by what can be recovered, but by what continues to exert pressure after it has gone.

Thread is her instrument of this paradox. Stretched, crossed, knotted, and accumulated, it converts empty space into something almost bodily. A single strand is fragile, incapable of sustaining much weight; thousands, interwoven, become an encompassing structure that can seem at once protective and imprisoning. The material carries no intrinsic narrative. Its meanings emerge through density, colour, and the objects it envelops. Black thread can suggest night, handwriting, or the impenetrable intricacy of the unconscious. Red invokes blood and attachment, the invisible continuity between bodies. White, associated with funerals in Japan, holds death and renewal in the same suspended breath. Colour becomes less a symbolic code than a condition of feeling.

A sample of how Chiharu Shiota has worked with the theatre.

The installations are drawn by hand, in situ, through repetitive gestures that Shiota has described as meditative. This labour matters. The apparent intricacy of the finished structures can obscure the individual actions from which they emerge: one thread laid across another, a knot tightened, a line extended into uncertain space. Their scale suggests an impersonal cosmic order, yet their construction remains intimate and fallible. Every strand records a decision; every intersection proposes a relationship. The resulting webs resemble maps whose destinations have vanished, leaving only the routes by which someone might once have reached them. Shiota’s art makes navigation itself an existential condition.

This understanding of space grew from a dissatisfaction with painting. Born in Osaka in 1972, Shiota initially imagined herself becoming a painter, but found that paint no longer offered an adequate expression of her identity. In 1994, during her studies in Australia, she performed Becoming Painting, covering her body with canvas and red enamel. The work was an act of liberation, an attempt to move beyond the polished object into an art made through physical exposure. After moving to Berlin in 1996, she studied with Marina Abramović, deepening her engagement with performance before turning toward a problem that would define her subsequent practice: how might an artwork retain the human presence without requiring the body itself?

Her answer was to make objects carry the burden of embodiment. A used suitcase contains more than its physical capacity; it implies departure, a destination, and the private arrangements of a journey. A dress preserves the contours of an absent wearer without disclosing who that person was. A chair suggests the posture of someone who once occupied it. These objects are neither illustrations of memory nor relics in any straightforward sense. They are instruments of inference, prompting the mind to construct an invisible person around a tangible remainder. By surrounding them with thread, Shiota gives this process material form. The web does not explain the absent life. It reveals how insistently we try to imagine it.

Connecting small memories detail, mixed media, Chiharu Shiota 2019/2026

In In Silence (2002/2026), this impulse assumes the gravity of an elegy. A charred piano and chairs occupy a room thick with black thread, their damaged surfaces emerging from a darkness that seems to have consumed the air itself. The installation originates in a childhood memory: when Shiota was nine, a neighbouring house burned, leaving a scorched piano outside. Though the instrument could no longer produce music, its beauty appeared to her more intense after the fire. The apparent contradiction is the work’s emotional centre. Destruction has not merely diminished the object; it has altered the terms under which it can be seen. What survives bears the event within it.

The piano’s silence is therefore not an absence of sound alone. It is the persistence of sound as expectation, a music that can no longer happen but has not entirely disappeared. The black web seems to give this impossibility a body, binding the ruined instrument to a space in which loss becomes almost architectural. Shiota does not sentimentalize damage by suggesting that suffering necessarily makes things beautiful. Rather, she attends to the terrible transformation through which an object becomes inseparable from what happened to it. The piano remains, but it can never again be only a piano.

Rebirth and Passing detail, mixed media, Chiharu Shiota 2019

The question of bodily survival becomes more explicit in Out of My Body (2019), where suspended red leather, cut into a netlike form, hangs above bronze casts of the artist’s limbs. The material evokes torn skin, while the separated casts suggest a body rendered into components. Shiota’s second cancer diagnosis, in 2017, brought her into direct confrontation with mortality and the unsettling distance between physical existence and the soul. Here, the body appears less as a unified self than as something vulnerable to disassembly, medical procedure, and the frightening impersonality of treatment. The red network holds together what the sculpture seems to have pulled apart. Its connections offer no easy reassurance: the body can be fragmented, yet the experience of being a body exceeds any inventory of its parts.

In this light, Uncertain Journey (2016/2026) expands the question of individual survival into a collective predicament. Red threads stream through the gallery, attaching themselves to metal boats suspended within the dense web. Visitors move beneath and around the installation, entering a structure that changes perceptually with every shift in position. The boats suggest migration, displacement, and the passage of a life toward an unknowable future. But the threads complicate the image of travel. They make each vessel part of a larger system of attachments, as though no journey could ever be entirely solitary, even when its destination remains unknown.

The work’s emotional force depends on this tension between connection and uncertainty. The web binds, but it does not direct; it offers neither a secure route nor a privileged vantage point. To walk through it is to inhabit a condition shared by strangers, each carrying a private history through a space shaped by countless others. The installation does not erase differences between individual journeys. Instead, it makes visible the precarious fact of interdependence: our lives intersect in ways we cannot fully perceive, and our futures remain entangled even when we cannot agree on where we are going.

Chiharu Shiota on the left with Iris Amizlev, Curator of Special Projects at the MMFA on the right.

The exhibition’s repeated reconstruction reinforces this idea. Although The Soul Trembles has travelled internationally since its premiere in Tokyo in 2019, its major installations must be rebuilt for each new site. Shiota visits the space and reimagines the work according to its dimensions, allowing the structure to become wider, narrower, higher, or otherwise transformed. The installation is never simply transported intact. It is made again. This process turns impermanence from a theme into a method: the work survives by accepting change, retaining its identity not through perfect repetition but through renewed acts of creation.

That principle also defines the exhibition’s relationship with its audience. Shiota’s personal experiences provide the work’s point of departure, but they do not dictate its final meaning. A visitor may encounter the boats through the experience of migration, the charred piano through grief, or the suspended threads through an entirely private memory that has no obvious equivalent in the artist’s biography. Such openness is not vagueness. It is the precise condition that allows an individual history to become shareable without becoming universalized into sameness.

What trembles, finally, is not the soul as some separable essence waiting to be represented. It is the fragile continuity between what we have lost and what we are still capable of feeling. Shiota’s threads give that continuity a form: delicate enough to suggest its vulnerability, extensive enough to reveal its reach. Her installations do not promise that memory will preserve us intact, or that death can be made intelligible through art. They offer something more modest and more profound. The departed remain neither fully present nor wholly gone; they persist in the objects they touched, the spaces they altered, and the connections that outlive their makers. In Shiota’s haunted architecture, absence becomes a way of holding on—not by preventing disappearance, but by giving its consequences somewhere to live.

ref: https://www.artasiapacific.com/people/essential-works-of-chiharu-shiota/

Until February 14, 2027 // Chiharu Shiota The Soul Trembles

LENA GHIO   

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Herman Yau’s We’re Nothing at All and the Fractured Conscience of Hong Kong

TRAILER 

There are films that announce their intentions through spectacle, and others that disclose their true preoccupations only after the spectacle has subsided. Herman Yau’s We’re Nothing at All (不赦之罪) belongs, uneasily and compellingly, to the latter category. Initially, its premise promised the familiar satisfactions of a procedural investigation: a catastrophic crime, a forensic specialist summoned from retirement, a trail of evidence, and the gradual reconstruction of a mystery. Yet the film soon abandons the reassuring geometry of the detective story. What begins with an explosion on a double-decker bus becomes an inquiry into the social conditions under which human beings are rendered disposable. The central question is no longer simply who committed the crime, or why, but what kind of society makes catastrophe imaginable as an answer to suffering. In Yau’s vision of Hong Kong, the investigation penetrates not merely the circumstances of a bombing but the moral architecture of a city whose prosperity conceals profound inequalities.

The opening disaster, inspired by the 1998 Wuhan bus bombing, establishes a narrative of dislocation that Yau subsequently unfolds along two intersecting trajectories. Lung Sir, played with restrained authority by Patrick Tam, is a disgraced forensic expert recalled to investigate the explosion. His professional discipline provides the film with its procedural framework: bodies must be examined, images scrutinised, discrepancies reconciled. But the evidence leads beyond the reassuringly impersonal world of forensic science, towards the lives of Fai and Ike, a young gay couple whose histories of economic precarity, familial rejection and social exclusion culminate in an act of devastating violence. Their story, reconstructed through flashbacks, gradually unsettles the conventions of the investigation. Each clue becomes a fragment of lived experience; each revelation exposes the inadequacy of explanations that isolate criminal acts from the circumstances surrounding them. Yau’s central formal ambition is to make these two narratives illuminate one another, transforming the detective’s search for causality into an examination of collective responsibility.

This ambition acquires its force from the film’s unmistakably local specificity. Although the originating incident occurred in mainland China, We’re Nothing at All is fundamentally concerned with contemporary Hong Kong: its cramped domestic arrangements, its conspicuous social stratification, its persistent prejudices and its increasingly strained relationship with the promise of urban prosperity. Fai’s residence in a subdivided unit is particularly telling. Such spaces are more than expressions of inadequate housing; they materialise a social order in which privacy, security and personal dignity become privileges distributed according to economic means. The city’s vertical grandeur, so often celebrated in cinema, acquires a less flattering significance when set against the compressed interiors inhabited by those unable to participate fully in its prosperity. Yau understands that inequality is experienced not only through income but through space: through the number of people sharing a room, the absence of a refuge, and the humiliating knowledge that even the most elementary forms of comfort remain beyond reach. The film’s social landscape is therefore not incidental to its tragedy. It is among the tragedy’s principal authors.

Yau’s career makes this preoccupation unsurprising. A filmmaker whose work ranges from the transgressive extremity of The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome to the socially observant dramas Whispers and Moans and True Women for Sale, he has consistently demonstrated an appetite for subjects respectable cinema might prefer to leave undisturbed. His background in Cultural Studies lends an additional dimension to this trajectory, although intellectual credentials alone cannot guarantee artistic insight. In We’re Nothing at All, his characteristic willingness to confront the grotesque becomes a means of puncturing social decorum. The film’s graphic violence and sexual explicitness are not separable from its wider sensibility: Yau wants to expose what polite public discourse conceals, whether bodily degradation, institutional indifference or the intimate cruelty of prejudice. His cinema can be abrasive, even blunt, but its abrasiveness has a purpose. Beneath the sensational surface lies an insistence that the marginalised should not disappear simply because their existence inconveniences the stories a society prefers to tell about itself.

The relationship between Fai and Ike, however, reveals both the urgency and the limitations of this approach. Their intimacy is rendered in warm, golden hues that contrast sharply with the colder visual atmosphere surrounding Lung’s investigation. The distinction gives the film some of its most affecting images: tenderness appears as a fragile enclave within a world organised around surveillance, judgement and exclusion. Yet the visual delicacy of these passages is not consistently matched by psychological depth. We learn more about the hostility directed at the couple than about the private language through which their relationship develops. Their sexuality becomes legible principally through rejection, while their love is asked to signify the injuries inflicted by a prejudiced society. The result is a troubling paradox. Yau grants marginalised characters narrative centrality, but does not always grant them equivalent interiority. Fai and Ike are indispensable to the film’s argument, yet sometimes seem insufficiently realised as individuals whose desires, contradictions and ordinary affections might exceed that argument. Their suffering is vividly established; their lives before suffering becomes destiny remain frustratingly indistinct.

This imbalance complicates the film’s political effectiveness. Yau is alert to the hypocrisies of public life, including the gap between official campaigns promoting urban vitality and the material conditions confronting those expected to participate in it. Brief moments of political satire suggest a city in which administrative optimism has become increasingly estranged from ordinary experience. Nevertheless, the film’s social observations occasionally arrive with the bluntness of an indictment whose verdict precedes its evidence. Poverty, homophobia and institutional failure are all persuasively identified as pressures, but they are not always explored with the patience necessary to reveal how those pressures differ in kind, intensity and consequence. Queer experience, in particular, risks becoming an emblem of social exclusion rather than a fully inhabited reality. The distinction matters: representation is not achieved simply by placing marginalised people at the centre of a narrative. It requires attention to the specific textures of their existence, to what they cherish as well as what they endure.

The film’s most consequential difficulty emerges in its attempt to establish a moral correspondence between the young couple and Lung. As the investigation develops, the retired specialist’s own crisis brings him into unsettling proximity with the despair that has overtaken Fai and Ike. Yau appears to suggest that the distance between ordinary respectability and catastrophic desperation may be narrower than society cares to acknowledge. This is a recognisably humanist impulse, and Patrick Tam gives it considerable weight. Lung is neither an infallible investigator nor a convenient symbol of institutional virtue; his vulnerability gradually reveals the person concealed beneath professional authority. The affection of his wife, the decency of his assistant Raymond, and the quiet loyalty of Ike’s sister offer counterweights to the film’s pervasive bleakness. These relationships suggest that compassion survives even where social structures fail, and that goodness need not announce itself grandly to become consequential.

Yet the comparison between Lung and the two young men also threatens to flatten the very inequalities the film has worked so hard to expose. Despair may indeed arrive suddenly, but its consequences are shaped by the resources available to those who experience it. A middle-class man with a supportive family occupies a fundamentally different position from two economically vulnerable gay men whose homes have become sites of rejection. To place their crises within a universal account of human frailty risks confusing emotional resemblance with social equivalence. The film’s insistence on our shared capacity for suffering is humane; its implication that this suffering can be understood without sufficient attention to material circumstances is less convincing. Here, Yau’s compassion becomes a double-edged instrument: it broadens the film’s moral horizon while softening the structural critique that gives the story its greatest urgency.

Ultimately, We’re Nothing at All is more compelling as an act of social conscience than as a fully integrated work of drama. Its procedural machinery, political observations, queer romance and humanist resolution do not always cohere, and its characters sometimes bear the burden of ideas they have not been allowed enough space to complicate. Yet its imperfections should not obscure the seriousness of its undertaking. Hong Kong cinema has repeatedly demonstrated that intimate lives can reveal the pressures of an entire society, from Ann Hui’s attentive domestic realism to Ray Yeung’s explorations of queer ageing and belonging. Yau approaches this tradition from a rougher, more confrontational direction, favouring rupture over quiet observation, but shares its conviction that the personal is never entirely private. His film leaves behind a disturbing question about the distance between seeing suffering and understanding it. An investigation may establish the sequence of events, identify the perpetrators and reconstruct the final moments of the dead. It cannot, by itself, explain the world that preceded them. We’re Nothing at All does not fully resolve that problem, but it recognises its terrible importance. Its deepest achievement lies in asking us to look beyond the explosion, towards the accumulated injuries that made its aftermath possible.

上方的翻译应用 •  Shàngfāng de fānyì yìngyòng

LENA GHIO   

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Astrological Analysis of Elon Musk’s Current Potential Role in Ukraine/Russia/US war

Image is AI generated

The current situation involving Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky raises serious concerns about Elon Musk's financial security, legal exposure, personal independence, and reputational risk. Trump and Putin's stated intention to deprive Zelensky of assets creates circumstances that require careful scrutiny, particularly if another individual (Musk?) is expected to provide financial resources, business assistance, or practical support. The central concern is whether involvement in their objectives could expose that individual to disproportionate risks while primarily benefiting Trump and Putin.

Financially, the situation presents the possibility of losses, unexpected liabilities, and continuing obligations. Requests for money, guarantees, access to business assets, or participation in transactions could create commitments that extend beyond their original purpose. Without clear terms and a full understanding of the potential consequences, the Musk could bear significant costs without receiving corresponding benefits. Maintaining control over personal finances, business operations, and assets is therefore essential.

Legally, participation in a dispute concerning Ukraine's property could create serious complications if transactions are improper or their purpose is unclear. Signing documents, transferring funds, making representations, or facilitating the movement of assets without appropriate verification could expose participants to liability. The stated intention to deprive Zelensky of assets warrants particular caution, although the precise legal implications depend on the facts and the nature of any proposed actions. Independent legal advice is advisable before undertaking commitments that could affect ownership rights or legal responsibilities.

Reputationally, association with Trump and Putin could damage professional credibility. Their dispute with Zelensky is based on the leaders ambitions and  to allegations of misconduct. Even someone who did not initiate the conflict might face questions about their judgment, involvement, or integrity. Protecting one's reputation requires transparency, careful documentation, and a clear distinction between legitimate assistance and participation in questionable conduct.

The situation also raises concerns about independence and conflicting interests. Trump's strong allegiance to Putin may encourage decisions driven by personal loyalty rather than objective assessment. However, their shared priorities do not necessarily align with the interests of others involved. If Trump and Putin receive the principal benefits while another person supplies resources, assumes obligations, or accepts the consequences, the arrangement could create an unfair imbalance of risk and reward.

Zelensky's position must also be assessed independently. He should not automatically be treated as an adversary simply because Trump and Putin regard him as one. Allegations and suspicions should be distinguished from verified facts, and any concerns about his conduct should be evaluated objectively. Participation in unlawful efforts to deprive him of property, mislead him, intimidate him, or damage his reputation could have serious consequences.

The most prudent response is to maintain clear boundaries and avoid commitments until the facts, legality, responsibilities, and potential outcomes are understood. Relevant communications and financial records should be preserved, access to accounts and business assets protected, and independent professional advice obtained

Nota Bene: The above is a distilled astrological analysis of today’s transiting planets, viewed through the lens of what I see as Trump’s current betrayal of NATO allies, his failure to uphold responsibilities toward Ukraine, and the consequences of his actions for the American people.

This analysis is based solely on astrological interpretations and possibilities, not on claims of certainty. I do not know any of the individuals discussed personally, yet their decisions have far-reaching implications for our collective security and well-being.

I sincerely hope Elon Musk will reflect carefully on how he chooses to use his considerable resources and influence. Political decisions and actions can have devastating human consequences, and I believe the choices he has made in recent years have contributed to a climate in which hundreds of thousands of lives have been placed at risk. Such consequences should give us all pause. No one with this degree of influence should underestimate the human cost of their political choices—or the opportunity they still have to help reduce suffering and protect lives.

LENA GHIO   

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FNC 2026: Wild Horse Nine

 

FNC 2026 / Wild Horse Nine trailer

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Wild Horse Nine: At the End of the World, the Men Who Made It Worse

There are films that use a landscape as a backdrop, and films that discover in a landscape a way of thinking. Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, set partly on the remote, elemental terrain of Easter Island, belongs uneasily and magnificently to the latter category. The island’s volcanic contours, vast Pacific horizons, saturated colours, and monumental stone figures offer something more than visual splendour: they establish a geography of moral isolation, a place where the world’s political machinery seems impossibly distant and yet its consequences remain everywhere. Against this extraordinary setting, McDonagh stages an encounter between two American intelligence operatives who have spent their lives manipulating history and now find themselves unable to escape its accumulated wreckage. Featuring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell at their most compellingly combustible, the film is a dark comedy about complicity, mortality, male friendship, and the absurd human appetite for absolution. It is also a film of productive contradictions, whose visual poetry and extraordinary performances occasionally expose the limits of its own satirical imagination.

Set in 1973, in the shadow of the Chilean coup that would overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Wild Horse Nine follows two veteran CIA agents whose professional lives have been shaped by the discreet manufacture of political catastrophe. Chris Carlisle, played by Malkovich, is a dying operative whose terminal cancer, intermittent forgetfulness, and long-cultivated contempt for ordinary morality have begun to disturb the equilibrium of his cynicism. His companion, Lee Chesterfield, embodied by Rockwell with an affecting combination of patience and melancholy, is charged with keeping his increasingly indiscreet partner from revealing secrets that powerful men would prefer to leave buried. Their journey from Santiago to Easter Island is ostensibly a respite from espionage, but the farther they travel from the machinery of American power, the more insistently its moral consequences follow. McDonagh understands that geographical escape is not the same as spiritual departure. One can cross an ocean without ever leaving the country one has made of oneself.

The film’s central achievement is the relationship between its two protagonists, a friendship so deeply embedded in shared experience that neither man possesses the emotional vocabulary to acknowledge its tenderness. McDonagh has long been fascinated by men who communicate affection through provocation, cruelty, and elaborate verbal evasions; here, that familiar preoccupation acquires a more sombre dimension. Carlisle and Chesterfield have spent decades discussing the practicalities of killing without seriously interrogating the morality of the act. Their conversations turn upon the etiquette of assassination, the peculiarities of national character, the deficiencies of American cheese, and the theological absurdities that arise when men accustomed to dispensing death begin contemplating their own. Their humour is not a refuge from their history but one of its instruments. The joke allows them to approach the truth without having to remain in its presence for too long.

Malkovich gives Carlisle a performance of exquisite, unnerving precision. His delivery, with its extravagant enunciation and leisurely contempt, transforms even the most grotesque observations into miniature theatrical events. Beneath the character’s cultivated intellectual superiority, however, lies a man whose certainty has begun to fracture. His terminal illness has not made him virtuous; it has merely rendered the old arrangements between conscience and denial less dependable. He records his thoughts on a dictaphone, ostensibly preparing a memoir, while his recollections drift between geopolitical atrocities, private grievances, and eccentric meditations on moths. Once indifferent to the suffering of others, Carlisle has begun escorting insects outside rather than killing them. The gesture is absurdly small beside his history of violence, and McDonagh wisely allows it to remain so. Yet this new solicitude suggests the possibility that conscience may return not as a revelation but as an embarrassing, almost involuntary tenderness toward life.

Rockwell supplies the film’s essential counterweight. Where Malkovich makes cynicism theatrical, Rockwell makes it weary. His Lee is less flamboyantly nihilistic, more attentive to the emotional obligations that his partner has spent a lifetime evading. Their chemistry is remarkable precisely because it does not depend upon sentimentality. Lee’s exasperation contains devotion; his restraint conceals a grief he cannot quite formulate. He has been entrusted with Carlisle’s final wish, a request that forces their friendship into the uncomfortable territory where loyalty and moral responsibility cease to be interchangeable. Rockwell understands that the character’s deepest conflict is not simply whether to obey his companion, but whether love can remain love when it is asked to participate in another person’s destruction. Together, the actors make the film’s philosophical questions intimate, giving metaphysical weight to pauses, interruptions, and arguments that seem, on the surface, gloriously ridiculous.

Easter Island provides the film with its most arresting visual and symbolic resource. Its immense stone figures, the moai, stand as mute witnesses to histories that exceed the comprehension of passing visitors. The surrounding landscape, alternately austere and astonishingly vivid, offers a striking counterpoint to the cramped moral universe inhabited by McDonagh’s Americans. The men arrive expecting distance, perhaps even transcendence; instead, the island becomes a mirror in which their smallness is newly visible. Nature does not absolve them, and beauty offers no automatic consolation. The Pacific horizon may suggest infinity, but the past remains stubbornly human. In the film’s most resonant visual passages, the contrast between the island’s grandeur and the protagonists’ verbal pettiness produces an almost tragic irony: these men have participated in the remaking of nations, yet cannot settle the elementary questions of what they owe the dead, one another, or themselves.

McDonagh’s dialogue remains a formidable pleasure. His characters speak in barbed, digressive exchanges whose comic rhythms recall the theatre of Samuel Beckett, where language becomes both a defence against despair and evidence of its persistence. A conversation may wander through religion, race, American imperialism, or the culinary indignities of national identity before suddenly revealing a wound beneath the wit. Steve Buscemi, as the anxious intelligence superior attempting to contain the damage, adds another finely calibrated performance to the ensemble. The arrival of two young Chilean left-wing students, Monica and Alicia, introduces a generational contrast between those who still believe political conviction can change the world and those who have made careers out of ensuring that it does not. Yet the film gives these women comparatively little interior life, too often positioning them as instruments of male revelation rather than fully realised participants in the historical and moral drama. This imbalance diminishes the film’s perspective, particularly when its critique of power might have benefited from the voices of those most directly threatened by it.

More troubling is McDonagh’s treatment of the historical atrocities that underpin the narrative. The CIA’s involvement in efforts to undermine Allende’s government belongs to the documented history of American intervention in Latin America; the film’s references to other covert operations likewise invoke consequences that extend far beyond the private regrets of its fictional agents. McDonagh’s irreverence can illuminate the grotesque distance between bureaucratic language and human suffering, exposing how easily violence becomes a professional accomplishment. At other moments, however, his appetite for the perfectly sharpened punchline threatens to reduce historical catastrophe to an opportunity for mordant entertainment. The problem is not that political horror must be approached solemnly, but that comedy requires an awareness of where its moral weight falls. When the perpetrators receive the richest dialogue, the most complicated emotions, and the most generous opportunities for redemption, the victims risk becoming scenery in somebody else’s reckoning.

This tension prevents Wild Horse Nine from achieving the sustained tragicomic perfection of McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, though the comparison also clarifies what makes the newer film distinctive. Its ambitions are broader, its historical burden heavier, and its sympathies more compromised. McDonagh is drawn to the possibility that even terrible men might experience a final awakening, that a flicker of compassion might matter even when it cannot repair the damage already done. The idea is emotionally persuasive but ethically precarious. Redemption cannot mean that remorse erases responsibility, or that the dying conscience of a perpetrator matters more than the lives destroyed by his actions. The film is strongest when it leaves this contradiction unresolved, allowing its characters to search for grace without pretending they have earned it.

Ultimately, Wild Horse Nine is a beautiful, unsettling, imperfect film whose greatest pleasures emerge from the collision between extraordinary performances, an unforgettable landscape, and questions that refuse to yield comfortable answers. Malkovich and Rockwell lend genuine emotional substance to a friendship expressed almost entirely through insults, evasions, and shared complicity. Easter Island gives their journey a visual majesty that their private philosophies cannot diminish, while McDonagh’s mordant intelligence keeps mortality from becoming merely solemn. Yet the film’s final challenge is not whether its two men can find peace before death, but whether peace, for men like these, can ever be separated from the reckoning they have avoided. The island remains indifferent; the statues do not pronounce judgment. The ocean simply continues beyond the limits of vision. What remains is the uncomfortable possibility that a man may learn to spare a moth after helping to destroy lives, and that this small mercy can be both genuinely moving and grotesquely insufficient. In that contradiction lies the film’s deepest achievement: its recognition that the human desire for forgiveness is most compelling precisely when forgiveness is not ours to give.

The movie hits theatres this November 6.

LENA GHIO   

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FNC 2026 : Rose

FNC 2026 / Rose

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The Freedom of Trousers: Sandra Hüller and the Quiet Revolt of Rose

There are films that announce their politics with the urgency of a manifesto, and others that allow an entire social order to incriminate itself. Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an austere, quietly audacious historical drama starring Sandra Hüller, belongs to the latter category. Set in the bruised aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, this monochrome parable follows a battle-scarred soldier who arrives in a remote German village claiming an inheritance, concealing a truth that the film’s audience recognizes almost immediately: beneath the coarse clothing, weathered face, and assumed masculinity is a woman determined to live according to her own calculations of freedom. What follows is at once a darkly comic social experiment, a study of survival under patriarchal rule, and a tragedy whose emotional force derives from its refusal to confuse rebellion with triumph. Schleinzer does not merely revisit history; he discovers within its cruelties an unsettling portrait of the present.

Hüller’s Rose is a creation of extraordinary physical intelligence. Her body seems to have learned the economy of military life: the economical stride, the guarded shoulders, the deliberate stillness of someone who has survived by making herself difficult to read. A wound disfigures her face, giving her an appearance that unsettles the villagers while suggesting the more intimate injuries of a life spent negotiating hostile circumstances. Hüller, whose performances in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest established her formidable command of moral ambiguity, works here through an even more radical restraint. She never turns Rose into a theatrical puzzle or a contemporary emblem wearing historical costume. Instead, she makes the character’s silences active, her glances consequential, and her occasional eruptions of anger startling precisely because they emerge from such disciplined composure. Every gesture seems to contain a decision; every withheld expression preserves a little territory that the world has not yet conquered.

The premise has the deceptively clean architecture of a folktale. After years of soldiering, Rose enters a devout Protestant community and claims to be the rightful heir to a neglected farmhouse. The villagers regard this strange, taciturn newcomer with suspicion, but labor, religious observance, money, and a talent for practical usefulness gradually earn their acceptance. Rose repairs the property, employs workers, and establishes herself as a respectable man of means. Her most consequential acquisition, however, arrives through marriage. A neighboring farmer offers his eldest daughter, Suzanna, in a transaction that binds land and woman together with the unembarrassed efficiency of an economic contract. Rose accepts. The irony is merciless: having escaped the restrictions imposed on women, she must enter the institution that most conspicuously reproduces them in order to preserve her escape.

“There is more freedom in trousers,” Rose explains, adding that trousers are merely a piece of cloth. The apparent simplicity of this observation conceals the film’s governing paradox. Clothing is material, but its social consequences are immense; a garment becomes a passport, an alibi, and a declaration of independence. Rose’s disguise is hardly convincing to the audience, yet the community’s willingness to accept it reveals how thoroughly perception has been organized by expectation. The villagers see a man because the structures of their world instruct them to recognize authority in masculine appearance. A woman may labor, possess property, and exercise intelligence, but these qualities acquire public legitimacy only when attributed to a male body. Schleinzer’s sharpest joke is therefore also his most devastating argument: gender is not simply something Rose performs. It is a hierarchy that everyone else is performing alongside her, often without recognizing the part.

Schleinzer, who previously explored the brutal manufacture of social identities in Michael and the historical construction of racial otherness in Angelo, brings to Rose a filmmaker’s instinct for the grotesque hiding inside respectable convention. His background as a casting director is evident in the village’s peculiar human topography. Faces seem carved by suspicion, bodies carry the accumulated habits of deprivation, and communal rituals possess the solemn absurdity of ceremonies whose participants have forgotten their original purpose. Yet the film’s humor never becomes a comfortable escape from its historical severity. It emerges in the gap between what the villagers believe and what the audience knows, in the practical improvisations demanded by Rose’s domestic arrangements, and in the extraordinary elasticity of a society prepared to overlook almost anything so long as its prescribed appearances remain intact. The laughter catches in the throat because the joke is never merely on the villagers. It is on the systems that make their blindness useful.

The marriage introduces the film’s most delicate complication. Suzanna, played with disarming precision by Caro Braun, initially appears the embodiment of dutiful submission: young, awkward, and prepared to accept the future selected for her. But Braun gradually reveals an intelligence that the character’s social position has trained her to conceal. Her responses become less predictable, and the relationship between husband and wife acquires a cautious tenderness that neither the institution of marriage nor Rose’s original calculations can adequately explain. When a baby unexpectedly enters their lives, the household settles into an arrangement that appears to satisfy everyone. The village recognizes the family it expects to see; Suzanna finds a measure of intimacy; Rose approaches something resembling domestic peace. Yet the arrangement remains precarious, sustained by a collective willingness not to examine too closely what makes it possible. Schleinzer allows affection to develop without forcing it into a convenient declaration about sexuality or identity. Rose’s inner life remains resistant to easy classification, and the film is stronger for leaving that resistance intact.

This ambiguity is essential to the film’s distinction between self-determination and modern identity politics. Rose does not offer a neat vocabulary for understanding herself, nor does the narrative demand that she fit a contemporary category. Her explanation is practical rather than doctrinal: trousers provide freedom, and freedom is worth the deception required to obtain it. Such pragmatism should not be mistaken for emotional simplicity. Rose’s choices arise from a world in which survival often requires compromise, and in which the desire to live unmolested can be more urgent than the desire to be understood. The film’s historical distance permits no easy analogy, but its central question travels readily across centuries: what does authenticity mean when the price of openly inhabiting oneself is exclusion, dispossession, or death? Schleinzer offers no consoling answer. He understands that liberation can begin as an expedient arrangement, and that a life constructed around concealment may nevertheless contain genuine dignity, tenderness, and self-knowledge.

Formally, Rose achieves an uncommon unity between its subject and its style. Cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz renders the countryside in black and white, transforming timber, mud, weathered skin, and bleak expanses of land into a visual world suspended between historical document and nightmare. The images possess a severity reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dreyer, but their precision is never merely devotional. Faces emerge from darkness like evidence reluctantly brought to light; the landscape seems less a pastoral refuge than a witness to the social violence embedded within it. Production and costume design deepen the illusion of material antiquity, giving every worn surface the authority of something that has endured rather than been decorated. Hansjörg Weißbrich’s editing pares the narrative to approximately 93 minutes, allowing the story to tighten without becoming mechanical. Tara Nome Doyle’s spare vocal music, meanwhile, introduces a strain of almost unearthly lament, articulating an anguish that Rose’s guarded body refuses to express. The film’s craftsmanship is so exact that its silences feel composed rather than empty.

The narration, delivered by Marisa Growaldt in a measured, faintly academic voice, adds another layer of productive uncertainty. It offers access to Rose’s circumstances without pretending to unlock her completely. This distance prevents the film from collapsing into psychological explanation, preserving a tension between the individual’s unknowable interior and the public narratives imposed upon her. The approach occasionally risks emotional frigidity, and Schleinzer’s insistence on formal control can make the machinery of the parable visible. But the restraint proves especially powerful when the story approaches its devastating conclusion. Having allowed its improbable domestic arrangement to acquire warmth and apparent stability, the film refuses to mistake temporary accommodation for lasting safety. The final movement arrives not as a sensational reversal but as the return of historical reality, with all its punitive indifference. Schleinzer’s refusal to sentimentalize the consequences gives the ending its terrible composure.

At the center of Rose is a distinction between being accepted and being free. The villagers may welcome Rose as long as she fulfills the obligations attached to her assumed identity, but their approval cannot abolish the conditions that made her disguise necessary. Her apparent success exposes the fragility of a social order that confuses convention with nature and obedience with virtue. In this respect, the film’s politics are more penetrating than an uncomplicated celebration of defiance would have been. Rose does not overthrow the system; she discovers a narrow passage through it, then attempts to build a life inside the space she has won. That the passage eventually closes does not invalidate the freedom experienced along the way. It makes the cost of that freedom visible.

With Rose, Schleinzer confirms his place among the most uncompromising formalists working in contemporary European cinema, while Hüller delivers a performance whose greatness lies in how little it demands to be admired. Together, they transform an obscure historical premise into a work of rare moral and cinematic concentration. The film’s achievement is not that it makes the past resemble the present, but that it reveals how stubbornly certain arrangements of power survive changes in costume, language, and law. Rose’s trousers are only cloth, after all. The world’s response to them is the tragedy. And within that tragedy, Hüller finds something that no social order can entirely confiscate: the fierce, unadvertised dignity of a person who has decided, against the available evidence, to live.

ROSE

STARRING SANDRA HÜLLER Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the 76th Berlinale Silver Medallion Recipient at 53rd Telluride Film Festival DIRECTED BY MARKUS SCHLEINZER

Now on MUBI

LENA GHIO   

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