Milchwald

“You’re not our mother!” snarls eight-year-old Lea in the car on the way to a shopping trip to nearby Poland. When Lea and her younger brother start mimicking her, the exasperated Sylvia (Judith Engel) unceremoniously dumps the children on a country road. Both are gone by the time she returns. She doesn’t tell her husband, the children’s father, about what really happened, fearing that he’ll no longer love her, and goes along with the subsequent search—trapped in silence and the sterile atmosphere of their new home. Rigorously composed shots and sporadic musical interludes heighten the atmosphere of existential loss. Hochhäusler’s piercing debut film draws on motifs from the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, though here the stepmother is largely overwhelmed and the children are not entirely innocent. They are picked up in the forest by a Polish deliveryman who demands a ransom for them—the road home will be a long one. (bik)