TIFF: Nina Hoss in "Pelican Blood" and "The Audition"

Chris Feil takes a look at two performances by one of the greatest German actresses...

Katrin Gebbe follows her relentlessly grim Nothing Bad Can Happen with another slow-building horror-adjacent character study with Pelican Blood, a portrait of motherly conviction that love isn’t enough and hope is toxic. Nina Hoss is Wiebke, a skilled horse trainer and mother bringing a second adoptive daughter Raya (Katerina Lipovska) to her ranch. Shy at first, Raya quickly establishes herself as deeply troubled and a threat to her older daughter Nicolina (Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo). Misbehaving turns ominous, with Wiebke determined to show Raya the love she has been denied even as something evil within destroys Wiebke’s life...

Pelican Blood thrills with a Babadook-ian terror but more earthbound, successfully grounding its demonic elements in an imaginable reality. Gebbe is attempting to make a horror film that looks and sounds very much like the real world, approaching and each of Raya’s evil outbursts as a person actually might handle them rather than the demands of a genre. As things get quite serious indeed, Wiebke’s steadfastness does strain a degree of common sense that she doesn’t completely bail - on top of one particularly outlandish development that works perhaps only through the film’s straight-faced aplomb.

But it’s Hoss’ performance that makes all of Wiebke’s commitment believable and unflinchingly watchable. If the film never really examines Wiebke’s martyrdom beyond its thesis of the mighty love of motherhood, Hoss creates depth in the stages of her struggle from patience to depression to resoluteness. If elements of the film remind viewers of The Exorcist, the most exciting one is Hoss being as physically exhaustive and emotionally investing as Ellen Burstyn. She’s what makes the film deceptively real, her performance being the key that unlocks the tone Gebbe is going for.

The film also operates in metaphor more graceful than it might sound, the ranch horses mirroring the untameability of children, an art piece referenced in the title of a mother bird siphoning her own life source to sustain her offspring. But the balance of occult and melodrama here make a beguiling mix paired with Gebbe’s visual and narrative astuteness. Its scares cut right to the heart, and its third act feels exhaustive and inevitable, culminating all of Gebbe’s fascinations for an impressive second feature of unexpected punishments. B+

A quieter showcase for Nina Hoss comes with The Audition, Ina Weiss’ second film centering on the internal crisis of Hoss’ Anna, a violin teacher at a performance arts school. Anna pushes for a middling young performer named Alexander (Ilja Monti) to be admitted to the school, seeing some potential in him that her colleagues do not. Once in Anna’s studio, the shy boy shows little improvement under Anna’s taxing demands of discipline and musical intuition, turning him into an outlet for Anna’s mounting dissatisfaction with her own personal shortcomings.

Hoss excels here in externalizing Anna’s depressive turmoil despite the character’s uncommunicative nature. Anna is demanding with her own much more talented violinist son, resentful of the distance developing between them. Meanwhile she’s much more passive to her quickly disintegrating marriage - ambivalence flows through her affair with a nurturing man, and outright hostility at explaining herself peppers her conversations with her husband Philippe (Simon Abkarian). Anna doesn’t understand what she is going through or feeling, but Hoss’ physical subtlety externalizes her self-discovery in ways that is fascinating to watch - uncertainty, rage, and doubt flung in all directions, but most importantly inward.

Weiss creates a narrative flow to the film of placid status quos and sudden terse tensions, hingeing largely on the swings of Hoss’ performance. Becoming at moments like an unmacho Whiplash with more holistic aims, The Audition still isn’t without its dire consequences. But the film instead takes a non-judgmental view of Anna as she stumbles to find her own footing when bombarded with the resentments, expectations, and emotional inadequacies of the men around her. Perhaps a bit too tidy in its conclusion, it still provides an excellent example of why Hoss is one of our most underappreciated actresses. B

Comments

[Thanos]

hai artikel yang sangat bagus aku suka.
aku juga bisa kunjungi situs https://dinabas.com disana banyak sekali pembahasan-pembahasan menarik yang bisa bermanfaat bagi ana semua

[cal roth]

I love Nina Hoss, the best actress of the decade

[Ivonne]

Nina Hoss is such a remarkable actress. Thank you for this article.