It doesn’t look like Marian (Brigitte Hobmeier) knows where she is, but she knows where she’s going in “Woodland,” telling her husband George (Bogdan Dumitrache) she’ll be fine on the phone as heads down a lonely road with a silver suitcase, looking lost but getting a ride almost as soon as she puts out her thumb to hitchhike. It’s possible that the driver has some vague memory of her when her family has been one of the area’s largest landowners with their property line covering a local forest — or he’s just showing some small-town hospitality — but then again maybe not when she hasn’t been back to the farming community in nearly 20 years.
Marian might not want to be there specifically, nor is she necessarily wanted there when she rubbed a number of people the wrong way when she left in Elizabeth Scharang’s slow burn of a character study based on Doris Knecht’s 2015 novel “The Forest,” in which it only gradually becomes clear what’s brought her back to the village she grew up in. When she affixes her iPhone with its flashlight on to a lamp in her family’s home at night with no electricity to speak of, it isn’t a move she’s made for comfort at least in an immediate sense, and her work as a journalist in the city hasn’t pleased the local farmers who hang out at the town’s one bar, eager for her to sell her property and leave, and her former best friend Gerti (Gerti Drassl) no more excited to see her when leaving all but stranded her to take care of her ailing parents. However, Scharang makes audiences privy to the one brief memory passes through her mind again and again, only showing a brief snippet once as she goes for a run of taking cover during an attack of some kind and suddenly, it feels as if the grief she’ll get for coming home doesn’t compare to that she needs the time and space to process.
If “Woodland” sounds like a solemn rumination on trauma, it ends up being far from it as Scharang judiciously sprinkles out backstory like breadcrumbs, playfully teasing out Marian’s past as she gingerly takes steps towards the future and the general chill in the air is crisply conveyed by frequent Terrence Malick cinematographer Jorg Widmer. Marian’s glorious red mane that cuts through the grey clouds that appear to permanently hover above the town should be a hint that eventually a thaw will start to occur, with not only George arriving in town, but the reemergence of her former flame Franz (Johannes Krisch), who can confer some of the respect he has around town to her. Hobmeier is captivating in the lead role, convincingly stubborn and determined to do everything on her own, not the least of which is the tricky business of healing, and both she and Scharang carefully calibrate a drama in which the intrigue of when she’ll let others in becomes as sharp as any thriller. Marian may be fleeing danger in “Woodland,” but Scharang ably demonstrates the road back can be just as treacherous.
“Woodland” does not yet have U.S. distribution.
