When it comes to horror, most modern audiences jump to places like Blumhouse with Paranormal Activity (2009) and Happy Death Day (2017), A24 with It Comes at Night (2017) and Talk to Me (2023), or even Lionsgate with Frailty (2001) and Saw (2004). There’s another film production company that you need to know about, Monochrom, based out of Vienna, Austria. They describe themselves as, “…an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking, and political activism,” which coalesces into experimental work that shocks and disquiets, often through disruption of equilibrium. One such member is writer/director/actor Johannes Grenzfurthner whose 2022 film, Razzennest, satirically took swipes at the movie-making industry (directors, influencers, critics — everyone, really) via an experimental supernatural horror structure in which we listen to what happens while the titular documentary plays before us. In his latest project, Solvent, Grenzfurthner offers a more conventional narrative through a first-person perspective, all while incorporating imagery that’s evocative like an intrusive thought or that compels one to dissociate entirely. Solvent is a difficult watch, not for the violence the narrative inflicts on the characters, but for the ideas which assault the audience in the investigation.

A scene from Johannes Grenzfurthner’s SOLVENT. Photo courtesy of Monochrom.

Former U.S. military member Gunner Holbrook (Jon Gries) now works as a cleaner, running a team that goes into less-than-hospitable environments to either retrieve objects or clear spaces. On his latest gig, Gunner leads his team, at the behest of Ernst Bartholdi (Grenzfurthner), to explore Bartholdi’s late-grandfather’s home in an effort to uncover potentially lost documents. Their work uncovers previously-unknown Nazi materials, a discovery that would be, on its own, disturbing for Bartholdi, until things go from bad to worse when an unearthed secret results in the death of one team member and the mental unraveling of another. Determined to figure out what happened with his team, Gunner continues the job, risking his career, his safety, and his sanity in the process.

A scene from Johannes Grenzfurthner’s SOLVENT. Photo courtesy of Monochrom.

Like Razzennest, Solvent is a supernatural horror show told through unconventional means. Here, the audience is mostly following Holbrook’s perspective, making this a great deal like a found footage story wherein we experience all that he does. Unlike a more traditional approach where we follow someone through a narrative, we’re quite literally tethered to Holbrook, which, as we move forward through the story, we’ll quite wish we weren’t. At the start, things are pleasant enough with the typical restrictions of knowledge kept to whatever natural and unnatural conversation (re: exposition dumps) are needed to get us to the catalyst of terror. This is handled with about as much grace as one can expect from the limitations of a first-person POV tale, chit-chat executed by the cast in a manner that supports the idea that they’ve worked together, but including a few awkward exchanges that remind us that Holbrook is going to be places that he needs to be for the audience to learn what they need. Sometimes this means extended shots of natural interaction where Holbrook moves with the group, sometimes this means using editing to move the characters from one place to another without much grounding beyond us knowing that they’re on a job. The trick is that the setup is that we’re watching things more or less as they happen and not that we’re watching a playback, so the “found footage” portion doesn’t maintain the illusion as much as it seeks to. That said, by orchestrating this tale within that structure, opportunities that would otherwise not work as well to disorient and disquiet the audience become more easily executed.

Unlike Razzennest which uses the setup of recording a commentary track (thereby limiting the narrative to disembodied voices) to present a steady stream of less chaotic images to us in a startling bit of dissonance, Grenzfurthner uses the slow erosion of reality for Holbrook and the notion that what we’re seeing isn’t actually happening live but is a recording to slowly ramp up the chaos. Thus, as the mystery of Bartholdi’s grandfather, Wolfgang Zinggl (portrayed via archived footage by Otto Zucker, Grenzfurthner’s own grandfather), deepens and Holbrook uncovers a focal point to explore, Grenzfurthner makes manifest Holbrook’s moments of discombobulation either as flashing images from moments in Bartholdi’s life as a child, Zinggl’s life as a young Nazi officer and aged grandfather, images of nature (some healthy, some rotting), or from Holbrook’s military experience). Singularly, they’re not necessarily informative or arresting, but by editing all of it together in a constant stream of visual information alongside Gries’s performance, the audience can find themselves overwhelmed, growing as disjointed as Holbrook himself. Credit to Grenzfurthner for the way that the things we’re shown and the character arc of Holbrook are initially treated as singular, separate elements whose connection illustrates a previously unconsidered Venn diagram of morality, even with disparate intention. Put another way, the audience is confronted with the notion, just as Holbrook is, that while many can agree that Nazis deserve punching and the nostalgia that’s kept the ideology strong across the globe is horrifying, the difference between monster and hero is a matter of perspective and justification.

Aleksandra Cwen as Krystyna Szczepankska in Johannes Grenzfurthner’s SOLVENT. Photo courtesy of Monochrom.

In light of the United States’s most recent election, one in which Former President Trump (convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records; currently investigated for election interference; currently investigated for attempts to overturn the 2020 electoral defeat; previously investigated for mishandled of classified documents (you can find details for these cases here); found liable for sexual abuse) was re-elected as the 47^th President (pending the ratification of the results) who plans to operate using the plans from Project 2025 to create a whiter America while creating a destabilized economy and education system (not conjecture, look at the nominees and their lack of experience; plus their own words regarding their views of their respective departments), a story like Solvent carries extra weight. The ghosts of the past aren’t dead because quite a few remain living, even as the survivors of the Holocaust dwindle, and, worse, their ideology thrives. It brings some comfort that Solvent highlights the general stupidity of Nazis, as well as their profound fascination with the perverse. What one does in the privacy of their home is their business, but Nazis can get fucked and their constant fascination with physical experimentation at the expense of health guidelines implies a broken view of humanity and their own false sense of godhood and superiority. Grenzfurthner and co-writer Ben Roberts provide many moments in Solvent which to lambast or otherwise decry the Nazi agenda, even as they use the perversity of that agenda to create shock for the audience to unpack. There was a time when seeing the more selfish, money-hungry, and sniveling side of that ideology would bring about joy — Nazis deserve ridicule at any opportunity — but the turnout for Trump does at least imply that the ideology still has too strong a foothold to consider it a joke relic. Though, based on the large amounts of reported regret, the win may be more of an indictment of American intelligence and access to information than political ideology.

Johannes Grenzfurthner as Ernst Bartholdi in Johannes Grenzfurthner’s SOLVENT. Photo courtesy of Monochrom.

Much like the title implies, there’s something in the water (both literally in the film and metaphorically in the world) and through Holbrook’s investigation, the audience is put in tight spaces (again both literally and metaphorically), the film challenging them. Is there an inevitability to the kind of regressive philosophies that would rather see the world burn than share it or is there a chance for redemption and peace? Solvent doesn’t provide an answer amid its horrors, but one does applaud the middle-finger it throws up as a defiant act against revulsions that refuse to back down and remain in the shadows.

Released September 26^th, 2024, in Austria.
Available on VOD and digital October 10th, 2025.

For more information on this and other projects, head to the official Monochrom website.

Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.

Categories: In Theaters, Reviews

Tags: Aleksandra Cwen, Ben Roberts, Bibiane Zimba, drama, English, Film Movement, Galen Howard, German, Hebrew, horror, Jasmin Hagendorfer, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Jon Gries, monochrom, Otto Zucker, Peter Plos, Roland Gratzer, Ronald von den Sternen, Sky Elober, Solvent