Given the narrative overlaps and echoes, we might as well state the obvious: Markus Schleinzer’s “Rose” plays, in a sense, as a distant, Germanic cousin to “Boys Don’t Cry.” Both films recount true stories of strangers assigned female at birth who present as male, arriving in new towns where they quickly find companionship and community. Without overstatement or any turn toward magical realism, her surprise pregnancy lands as a dark punchline, given the unfruitful instrument Rose uses to go through the motions, and takes on a far bleaker weight when we recall her father’s eagerness to secure her a marital bed. For his part, Schleinzer looks even further into the past, staging much of the film’s closing act in direct visual reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” Long before her sainthood — and her cinematic canonization — Joan of Arc herself was executed for gender nonconformity.
Author: Ben Croll
Published at: 2026-02-15 22:45:00
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