When an Austrian criminologist and former police superintendent (Murathan Muslu), who has a young daughter and is estranged from his wife (Miriam Fontaine) due to her affair with a police inspector (Marc Limpach), returns home to Vienna in 1920 following the aftermath of WWI and incarcerated as prisoner of war for two years in a Russian camp in Stefan Ruzowitzky's gripping, intense, twist-filled, morose, imaginative, well-acted, surreal, expressionist, 98-minute, 2021 crime thriller highlighted by a striking cinematography and sets, with architecturally skewed buildings mimicing the skewed mentality of the Viennese townsfolk, he works with a forensic pathologist (Liv Lisa Fries) and a police commissioner (Max von der Groeben) to investigate the grisly, sadistic slayings of former POWs (Tom Hanslmaier, Timo Wagner, Lukas Walcher, et al.) who turn up tortured and murdered while its citizens and police chief (Germain Wagner) ostracize and bully him and fellow soldiers (Aaron Friesz, Stipe Erceg, Eugen Victor, et al.) treat them like pariah.
Review of Hinterland
