Revanche

Götz Spielmann's Revanche earned a 2009 Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and won the Austrian Film Award for Best Direction. It also collected European Film Award nominations, and it confirmed Spielmann, until then a respected but lower-profile figure in Austrian cinema, as one of the country's most accomplished narrative directors. It premiered at Telluride and Toronto in 2008 and it was a fixture of art-house programming throughout the following year.

Johannes Krisch plays the lead, with Ursula Strauss, Andreas Lust and Hannes Thanheiser in support, and the cinematographer is Martin Gschlacht, a longtime collaborator of Jessica Hausner and Ulrich Seidl. Spielmann shot in the rural Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, his own home territory, and the texture of those landscapes shapes the film's grammar: long, deep-focus takes, almost no music, and a deliberately patient rhythm that reviewers often compare to the early work of Michael Haneke.

Austrian cinema was at one of its international high points in the late 2000s: Haneke's The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or in 2009, Seidl's Import Export was in competition at Cannes, and Hausner emerged with Lourdes. Revanche belongs to that exact moment, and we count it among the essential films of the wave, a clear example of how Austrian directors built international careers through long, observational, morally serious genre cinema.