Die Wand (Julian Pölsler, 2012)

A woman holidaying in the Austrian Alps discovers one morning that the whole valley she is in has been fenced off from the outside world by an invisible, impenetrable wall, and furthermore that the world beyond seems to be in a perpetual state of stasis. This may be a sci-fi starting point, but unlike the genre norm, there is no explanation and therefore no prospect of escape. Instead, the wall serves as a device for reflecting her own thoughts back on herself in a film where the main preoccupation is an existentialist meditation on the meaning of existence in total isolation as she struggles to find a reason to go on from day to day, month to month. The landscapes of The Wall are a particularly effective backdrop for this, pastorally beautiful and yet also inhumanly indifferent in their scale, and Martina Gedeck produces a performance of some power, somehow keeping herself going with quiet determination despite the hopelessness of her situation. This is no Robinson Crusoe story: the incomprehensibility of the prison created denies all exit routes aside from death, and that does make for a fundamentally depressing experience, but the moments of truth and insight that arise as her outlook changes serve as a reward in themselves.

7/10