Solvent: Body-Horror with National Socialist Origins

According to his grandson, old Wolfgang Zinggi was assigned to a concentration camp during WWII. After the war, he basically substituted “Zionists” for “Jews” in his anti-Semitic rants, peppering them with references to “the poor Palestinians,” because he knew he could get away with it. Zinggi disappeared and was declared dead several years ago, so a team of researchers hope to find some illuminating documents in his mold-infested Austrian house of horrors. Instead, they discover evil of another nature in Johannes Grenzfurthner’s Solvent, which releases tomorrow on VOD.

Krystyna Szczepanska is a Polish historian specializing in forensic fieldwork. She has used Gunner S. Holbrook’s recovery firm several times previously. They also happen to be on-again-off-again lovers. They will excavate with the permission of Zinggi’s grandson, Ernst Bartholdi, who hopes to use the footage from Holbrook’s helmet cam for some kind of ill-conceived publicity film. However, he will not want the world to see what transpires.

Szczepanska hopes to unearth concentration camp records. Instead, they find some kind of extremely contagious and invasive sludge, that might somehow be related to the mad scientist experiments at Zinggi’s camp. Regardless, tragedy soon strikes, killing one team-member and strangely debilitating Szczepanska. Months later, Holbrook still wants answers, so he returns for an unauthorized look-see.

Solvent is a hard film to fully get your head around. It is shot entirely from Holbrook’s perspective, found footage style, which ironically has a distancing effect. Not only does it directly address the Holocaust, which obviously entails considerable risks, it also incorporates a subplot involving war crimes in Bosnia. Those are heavy themes for a gross-out body-horror movie.

Nevertheless, Grenzfurthner and co-screenwriter Benjamin Roberts do their best to respect the sensitivities of potential viewers. It is also worth noting Holbrook’s dishonorable discharge from the American military was due to rather pedestrian larceny charges. The really scandalous stuff came from a later gig as a merc working for a Croatian militia.

Be that as it may, Solvent is a very strange and often extremely disgusting film. There are not a lot of obvious comparisons to the thing plaguing Holbrook and Szczepanska. The Zinggi farmhouse and related cellars and outhouses are also wildly creepy. Ordinarily, the production design team would deserve a lot of credit, but Grenzfurthner shot on-location, in his real-life late grandfather’s condemned property, which apparently truly was in the state suggested in the film, even including the toxic mold.

Jon Gries brings an apt edginess to the film, through his voice-over performance as Holbrook. Likewise, as Szczepanska, Aleksandra Cwen comes across smarter than 99% of found footage horror movie characters. Plus, Grenzfurthner and Roland Gratzner are both massively annoying as Bartholdi and the suspicious next-door neighbor, Freddi Weinhappl.

You will definitely want a hot shower and a tetanus shot after watching Solvent. The evil entity is deeply disturbing, but the state of its very existence must be a Hellish experience. This is definitely not a film for everyone, especially not the queasy or the anti-Semitic, but it is certainly distinctive. Recommended for fans of body-horror at its most explicit, Solvent releases tomorrow (10/10) on VOD.