Crew
Director – Johannes Grenzfurthner, Screenplay – Johannes Grenzfurthner & Ben Roberts, Producers – Günther Freisinger, Julianne Gabert, Johannes Grenzfurthner & Jasmin Hagendorfer, Photography – Florian Hofer, Music – Pieter de Graaf, Visual Effects Supervisors – Christoph Gstrein & Theresa Klotz, Special Effects Supervisor – Rüdiger Schnur, Makeup Effects – Roman Braunhofer & Thomas Mayr. Production Company – Monochrom.
Cast
Jon Gries (Gunner S. Holbrook), Aleksandra Gwen (Dr. Krystyna Szczepanska), Johannes Grenzfurthner (Ernst Bartholdi), Roland Gratzer (Fredi Weinhappl), Jasmin Hagendorfer (Cornelia Dunziger), Roland von der Sternen (Richie Fischvogt), Peter Plos (Kyle Edward Boll)
Plot
American expatriate Gunner S. Holbrook runs an industrial tracking service in Europe. They have been employed by Dr. Krystyna Szczepanska to conduct an investigation of an abandoned farm property in Egelsau, Lower Austria. The property was owned by aging Wolfgang Zinggl, who mysteriously disappeared. Zinggl was employed at the first ever Nazi concentration camp and Krystyna has come in search of valuable documents he may have possessed. As the search of the property begins, Krystyna ventures into the cellar where she discovers a pipe in the floor. She returns in a deranged state and attacks and kills her assistant. She has to be placed in an asylum. Some weeks later, Gunner returns to the property on his own searching for answers. He ventures down into the cellar to discover what the pipe leads to. After he drinks some of the water from down there, his personality is taken over.
Solvent was the seventh film from Austrian director Johannes Grenzfurthner who has previously made a mix of nerd culture documentaries like Traceroute (2016), Glossary of Broken Dreams (2018) and Hacking at Leaves (2024) and genre films like Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl (2014), Making Threshold (2021) and Razzennest (2021). Grenzfurthner can also be seen on screen here as the bespectacled grandchild of the Nazi, the inheritor of the property who runs some kind of skeezy internet sales operation.
Solvent is shot as a Found Footage film. That is to say that it appears to have been shot with a GoPro mounted to someone’s head or chest. We even get shots from the point-of-view of a borescope as it is sent down drainpipes and into the innards of latrines. The film is told from the perspective of the American expatriate Gunner S. Holbrook, who is voiced by US actor Jon Gries, although we never actually see the person behind the camera. (Gries himself never appears on screen other than a photo of him that is momentarily flashed by when everybody is introduced).
The location where the film takes place appears to be an authentic abandoned farm. There is no production designer or art director credit for the film, for instance. The property is filled with junk that has been allowed to decay, rot and collapse for years. The abandonment almost becomes a work of art in itself. It gives Solvent the feeling of an authenticity that a lot of films that use set designers to create artful decay will go to great lengths to achieve.
The build-up works well. The main issue with Solvent is that it is not exactly too clear what is going on with the former Nazi and the water down in the pipe. Did Zinggl somehow dissolve and his evil seep through into the water table? That’s the impression the film gives. The latter half of the film circles around these issues and certainly becomes interesting for a time. Perhaps the most interesting scene is where the point-of-view character Holbrook is talking to Johannes Grenzfurthner and Roland Gratzer and then suddenly starts talking in German as the personality of the Nazi appears to come and possess him. But you kind of wish there had been more of this and that the latter half had taken a firmer grip on what was going. Instead, everything seems to waver back and forth, before dissolving into a lot of frenetic editing.
Trailer here