Autumn Blood (3 Stars)

Sometimes film directors have a unique vision of how they want to make a film. They want to experiment. They reject everything they learnt at film school and do things differently. That's always a risk. It might work, it might not.

The experiment in this film is the lack of dialogue. It's not a silent film, but the dialogue is kept to a minimum. It takes 25 minutes before the first words are spoken, and at an estimate I'd say that one or two lines of dialogue are spoken once every 20 minutes. Something like "Give me the gun". That's it. An experiment like this doesn't work. It's not true to life. We see a scene in a cafe/restaurant, and nobody is talking. That's not normal. People talk. That's what they do.

The main character is a girl who lives on a farm in the mountains. The location isn't named, but it was filmed in Austria. When the girl is a child she witnesses her father being shot by a stranger. No motive, it just happens. Maybe if there had been dialogue we'd know why. As she gets older her mother becomes increasingly unable to run the farm, so the girl and her younger brother take over.

One day the girl is raped by the butcher from the nearby village. When she goes home, she finds that her mother has died of natural causes, but we have no way of knowing what natural causes. What we do see is that the children don't report the death. They lay her body in a field and cover it with stones. It's next to another pile of stones, suggesting that their father's death also wasn't reported. Without dialogue the viewer is forced to guess.

The girl is raped a second time when the butcher comes to the farm with two other men. His brothers? Your guess is as good as mine.

The owner of the post office reports that he's seen the girl looking badly bruised – this is one of the rare scenes with dialogue – so a social worker is sent to the farm. The butcher is worried that he'll be arrested, so he and the two other men take guns to hunt and kill the girl and her brother. They fight back, and the hunters become the hunted.

There are still strange things happening in the hunt. At night we see one of the men shivering in the cold, but the girl has taken off her clothes and is sleeping naked. Now don't get me wrong, I like gratuitous nudity in films, but in this case it makes no sense.

The film's biggest redeeming quality is the beautiful Austrian scenery, but as an experimental film it's a failure. There are too many unanswered questions that could have been cleared up if people had spoken. Why was the father killed? Why didn't the girl report the rape if she knew who did it? 

The film has only been released in Australia (the lead actress is Australian) and Germany, but it might be available on streaming services. Check for yourself if you're curious. I can't recommend "Autumn Blood", unless you like experimental films.