'Oasis' Review: Haneke Meets High School — SkimNews
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- Jannis Lenz makes his debut feature with "Oasis," a German film following three ostracized high-schoolers who retreat to woods outside their hometown to construct an "arcane shared reality" through escalating rituals
- The trio centers on Lukas (Florian Geißelmann), a quiet, artistic boy whose mother recently died and whose father (Godehard Giese) is a teacher at his own school — a setup the reviewer notes matches every descriptor "people use to describe a school shooter"
- Andi (Anton Petzold), the bullied son of a soldier recently posted to a nearby base, joins after a video of his humiliation circulates on social media; Maya (a breakout Mathilda Smidt), who lives un-parented and attends a specialist music school, completes the group
- The trio's games progress from paintball duels — Lukas builds a homemade flak vest from his dead mother's blouses and comes home with a baseball-sized bruise — to mutual acts of touching, biting, and bruising that the reviewer frames as either a pressure-valve or "practise" for outward violence
- Cinematographer Alexander Dirninger co-wrote the "elegantly spare" screenplay with Lenz; sound designers Nora Czamler and Benedikt Palier (who also composed the disquieting score) earn particular praise
- The film's cold, detached style is summarized as "Michael Haneke goes to High School," reflecting Lenz's apprenticeship with Austrian formalists, though the reviewer flags the final act's open-endedness as underwhelming
Why it matters: The film positions debut director Lenz within the Austrian formalist lineage of Haneke while hinging on a breakout performance from young actress Smidt; its deliberately unresolved central question — whether the trio's rituals defuse or rehearse violence — draws the sharpest critical fire, with the underwhelming open ending flagged as the film's main weakness.
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