User Reviews

I have not read the book nor read about the movie before watching it.

Almost everything about this movie is brilliant - location story cinematography acting editing - should have belonged in my top list of favorites. It is not. Even with the thematic similarities with Cast Away (7.7), Life of Pi (8.1) and elements from The Mist (7.2 - looking inwards at the face of a larger unknown), this premise and the story works beautifully. Stunning visual compositions and the soulful performance absolutely stand out.

What positively do not work are the monologues and the music. 'The wind was howling and the house was creaking' is something that needs to be written in a book – to say the same thing in the movie is an annoying intrusion while the audience is riveted with the visuals, sound and performance. There is at least 50% excessive pointless monologue in the movie – anybody heard of the use of silence? The movie is meant to be philosophical and inward looking. Lingering beautiful shots will be totally understood by the audience who are willing to invest in a movie like this. Why impose a monologue when it is only going to kill the impact of the moment? See Cast Away for comparison – for almost one hour in the movie there is no music no monologues – just the background sounds.

The "music" is unsuitable and almost completely not required. It is disappointing that the director who could write such screenplay, extract such magnificent visuals and riveting performance has no taste in music.

Perhaps with 15 less minutes and 50% less monologues, it could have made it to top ranks instead of the 6.7 it currently is.

If your sole movie genre is John Wick and The Walking Dead you should just move on and never click on this film. However, I enjoy that genre and found this film immersive and entrancing. I feel I would definitely have enjoyed the book on which it is based even more so.

SPOILER FOLLOW

A woman in the Austrian Alps founds herself completely cut off from civilization overnight by an invisible wall. Behind it, humanity and animal life seem frozen in place while streams continue to flow and weather continues to operate normally. The cause of the wall is never revealed or even speculated on. The woman learns to exist on her own, accompanied initially only in the company of a dog. Later her animal companions are added to. The movie is her internal dialogue as dictated to her daily journal. The cinematography of her existence in the alps is just beautiful. Brief happinesses and more frequent sorrows follow in her marooned existence. There are a few time jumps which I attributed to being a few jumbled pages in her daily journal which she compiles on random scraps of paper found in two cabins. I found that a charming touch. A lot of interesting introspection in this film but don't expect an uplifting experience. I enjoyed it.

I'm cool with the whole philosophical existentialism German slant, but I don't like films that teach me things I already know. I watch movies to be entertained and enlightened, people seem to be wetting themselves over this film as though it isn't preachy and repetitive. This kind of art house metaphorical film might have been groundbreaking in the 1960s, but these days it just seems tepid and derivative. Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout is an example of how this genre works really well; The Wall and Solaris (1972) are examples of how this genre can come across as ineffectual posturing.

I suppose there are people out there who think it's brilliant to watch a woman gather hay from a meadow for fifteen minutes or sit at her desk for long periods of time staring off into space, well my hat is off to you if you truly believe these sequences are the work of pure genius. I just see a bunch of stuff that belongs on the cutting room floor.

A woman (Martina Gedeck) wakes up alone in a remote hunting cabin. The people she came to the cabin with didn't return from a trip to town the previous evening. She decides to walk into town to look for them. As she walks towards town, she discovers that an invisible wall has mysteriously appeared and is blocking the road. This may sound like the beginning of an old Twilight Zone, but it isn't science fiction. It's hard for me to categorize this movie.

The first act of the movie revolves around her attempts to defeat the wall. She rams it with her friends auto to no avail. She tries to find a way around it, also to no avail. She turns on the car's radio, but all she gets is static. The wall is invincible. Once that fact is established, the invisible wall fades from the plot entirely, like the McGuffin it is, never to be explained or cared about again.

She shares her new world with Lynx, her friend's dog, two cats, and a pregnant cow named Bella. Her new world is fairly large. There are other cabins, which are empty, a meadow, mountains, and streams. Trapped in this world with her are a herd of deer and other wild animals such as birds and foxes, but apparently, no people. In fact, using her binoculars to look beyond the wall, she can see no signs of other humans anywhere. She may be the last person on Earth, move over Charlton Heston.

At this point the movie turns to her struggle to adapt to her Garden of Eden minus Adam. The story is told in "voice over" flashbacks. This movie has the least amount of dialog since "Quest For Fire". The unnamed woman is writing about her experiences from some nebulous point in the future. This confused me at times because she'd talk about the death of an animal and in the next scene, there would be the animal alive and well.

The story is slow paced. At times I wanted to hurry it along. As others have stated. The Wall, which was shot in the Austrian mountains, is visually stunning. Besides the scenery, the best thing about this movie is the questions about life and man kinds' role in nature that it raises. The Wall is an intelligent, thought provoking, but ultimately depressing film. But, if you can stand a little sadness, it is well worth a watch.

This contains a *spoiler* but I think you should read it anyway.

In The Wall, a woman finds herself stuck and isolated in a remote part of the Austrian mountainside while vacationing with friends. Her captor is the wall-- literally an invisible wall that surrounds her. Now here's the spoiler: the movie never explains what the wall is exactly.

I feel like it's important to get that out of the way, because the title and the description on Netflix may lead many to believe that this is a sci-fi exploration of how this fantastical wall interacts with the world. You'll be sorely disappointed and distracted if that is that is the ride you were hoping for. The Wall, rather, focuses on the evolution of the woman as she struggles to cope with her situation.

I overall enjoyed the movie, but the stream of consciousness narrative can be hard to follow at times. The movie has rich visuals, and it's great for animal lovers, though the queasy should be warned that suffering and death are depicted as well.

After being kept in suspense for two hours, the movie leaves me behind in despair. What would happen to the woman,now she has written her last notes?...

One of the most thrilling movies I have ever seen and (besides) of an outstanding beauty! Fully isolated from mankind by an invisible wall and being thrown on her own resources, the woman find an inner strength to survive and to take care of her "companions" the animals. After a hard struggle the woman find herself united with everything in life(one with the animals, one with nature). I recognize "die Wand" in our own lives, the restrictions we have to deal with, the loneliness. This movie shows that and more! A brilliant role of Martina Gedeck (we know her from "The lives of the others"). "Die Wand" is a masterpiece.

"Die Wand" or "The Wall" was Austria's foreign language submission to the Academy Awards the year after "Amour" took home the big prize. This one failed in making the list, but it is nonetheless an excellent movie. I guess it did not really do well with awards bodies as even with the Austrain film Awards it did not score a single win when Ulrich Seidl's newest work dominated the categories. The movie is written and directed by Julian Pölsler based on Marlen Haushofer 1963 novel. The film runs for roughly 100 minutes and basically we only hear Gedeck narrate and see what she is narrating in these scenes. There are a handful more actors in this film, but all only very briefly while Gedeck (still very stunning at 50) is in it from start to finish. Her narration is actually based on diary entries. She is already further in the future than what she tells us about. She knows things we do not know. The plot is as simple as it is effective. A woman wants to spend some quiet time in the mountains, but she quickly realizes that there is an invisible wall there holding her prisoner. She can see other people through it, but they are not moving. Are they dead? Is she dead? Is she hallucinating or suffering from a psychological illness? What happened? One of the film's biggest strengths is that there is no solution in the end, so feel free to speculate and discuss all the way. It reminded me a bit of Jürgen Domian's book "The day the sun disappeared".

12 minutes into the movie, the first crucial thing happens when her dog runs into the invisible wall. Yes, she has a dog, also a cow and a cat and also some young animals freshly born into this devastating scenario. They keep her company and possibly also keep her from going insane. Dog in a drama movie usually not a good prospect for the dog. Same here. The scene when she meets the man near the end is a very pivotal one. Pay attention to how she completely neglects approaching him in order to find a solution to her/their imprisonment. She did not think about it one second. All she thinks about is revenge for what he did to her companions. Listen closely to what she says about she got rid of his corpse compared to how she got rid of her dog. The tragedy is also referred to earlier in the film when she mentions her the death of her cat the first time that she was facing loss. Or how she talked about the death of her dog long before it happened in the film. Apart from that, what makes her interesting is also that we do not find out about who she was before coming to the mountainside. Also the audio is excellently done. There's is silence for most of the film and I really liked the contrast between the forced happy music Gedeck's character forces herself to listen to in the car and the general atmosphere.

This is the kind of film which is always worth a watch, but much more effective on the big screen, so be grateful if you have a home cinema or managed to watch this at your local theater. All in all, it is a dramatic tale on isolation, but there are some horror elements too, like her nightmare. It's one of the most atmospheric and metaphorical (white crow) films I have seen lately and is highlighted by Gedeck's outstanding lead performance. And last but not least, it has an excellent ending as the movie ends when she has no sheets of paper anymore and so is forced to stop with her diary entries. Highly recommended.

I haven't seen a foreign-(I'd say)low budget movie in a long time. This one was, in short words, interesting (or, maybe, I just missed a fantasy movie).

The scenery was beautiful indeed and there's no point in writing more about it since other reviewers already did.

The acting was OK in my opinion. But there's not much to say here either since there was only one actor who appeared through the entire movie.

The story began in a modern manner, with a scene from the present followed by a scene from the past (how it all began). I didn't particularly appreciate the beginning, but moving on. I liked some details, like that moment when the main character attempted to pet the dog, but quickly drew her hand back because of the reaction of the animal. But after she found herself trapped in that bubble, she quickly became best friends with the dog named Luchs.

I didn't like the length of some scenes. I understood that they're there to allow the viewer to reflect on the acts and thoughts of the woman, but I would've just cut off at least a few seconds.

The movie also contained some violent scenes like the one when the dog is killed. They were so contrastable with the peace and beauty of the place.

What I really liked in this movie was the balanced, rational, peaceful way that woman chose to deal with her situation. I thought that she is an introvert and I appreciated that she admitted her fears and emotions in her improvised diary. (But as a cat fan I really hated her for letting her white cat out on a dangerous night that killed her) The ending left me confused as I didn't expect it. I thought that they'd reveal something about that "wall". I understood that it was about meaning, possibilities, unknown, but I would've given them more points for creativity if the ending was different (but here's probably not so much their "fault" as much as the author's "fault").

The entire movie was peaceful, deliberate, only at times the silence was disturbed by some events like the car crush, the mysterious man, the hunting. I could think of many meanings, even some that probably had nothing to do with the author's intentions, like the whole wall is a symbol for extreme introversion, or for autism.

To sum up, it was an interesting movie to watch, but many of us might find it boring. I guess you just need the right mood for it. I do believe that there are many other better movies with such a subject to watch. Call me superficial but this one did not make me raise as many discussions and thoughts about life and human nature as other movies (and I'll give as an example another recent foreign movie: The Broken Circle Breakdown (but that movie has a completely different subject though).

I read this book 3 times because I loved the story. Funny enough, I discovered it in a tiny cabin up way up in the Superior National Forest of Minnesota. This book had been written in the early 60's and many critics hailed it as one of the first books of the feminist movement. And that's one theme I took away from it. A city woman gets trapped in the Alps and has to figure out how to live in an environment completely foreign to her. It celebrated her as a woman - a creature who's nature is to nurture and becomes capable of caring for herself and her menagerie including defending what is precious to her. She struggles with depression and illness and loss. Most importantly, she does it on her own without the help and tutorage of a MALE. To understand the poignancy of the story you have to understand the gender politics of the times - women still weren't seen as capable of running their own lives. It was assumed a woman needed a man to care for her and all a woman was good for was rearing children, cooking , getting her hair done. So please forgive what's going to feel like man-bashing - I'm only trying to explain how women felt during the feminist movement. It's also a tale of self reliance through almost insufferable loneliness.

I was excited to see that one of my favorite books had been made into a movie (even though I was almost a decade late in finding it). I DID like this movie but IMO it missed the mark. It should have taken place in its original time frame. Updating it to current time misses a huge part of this story - all she had to learn and how vulnerable she felt having no skills or physical strength in an environment which, at the time, was associated with just men (a hunting lodge with no heat or running water). She even drove up there with a MAN and his wife while wearing city clothes and shoes.

It had the opportunity to show ALL the things the woman had to learn, more of her ingenious ideas, her suffering through famine and illness. Basically, her becoming an independent, capable woman and surviving through very difficult circumstances without the lead of A MAN (meaning a person that would be skilled at living in that environment as hunting lodges are usually used by men). I felt that the movie's main theme was 'animals are people too' and spent too much time on her relationship with her dog. In the book, the woman loves and cares for ALL her animals - equally - even bringing her cow into the cottage for the winter to keep her warm. However, she does have a closer bond with her dog, Lynx.

I feel that when the man comes toward the end, the woman shooting him has multiple meanings. Not only is she protecting what has become 'her family' but she's cementing the fact that she doesn't need a man to help her or continue her lifestyle. There was an opportunity there for her to have another person to talk to and live with and have help from but she chose to eliminate the threat to what had become her family. This movie missed on a lot of what the book offers, and in doing so made it difficult for people to understand. It turned into a depressing tale of loneliness and loss without showing what she had gained throughout her tale.

IMO - read the book. The story makes more sense if you read the book.