Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s captivating film follows a woman passing herself off a man in 17th-century rural GermanyAustrian director Markus Schleinzer brings a chill to his eerie new movie, a stark monochrome period drama set in rural southern Germany in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ war. It is a film which, for all its grimness, is beautifully shot and as engrossing as a lurid soap opera. It’s a story of gender stereotypes, satirising the central mythic tenet of patriarchal Christianity and depicting humanity’s self-invention through violence and stealth. The chief influence is clearly Michael Haneke’s icy black-and-white film The White Ribbon from 2009, on which Schleinzer worked as casting director; Schleinzer shares with Haneke an interest in leaving the audience with an intractable, insoluble mystery: a problem that won’t tie up.The drama effectively conflates real-life cases of women passing themselves off as men in early modern Europe with the well-known case his...