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The difficult teenage years are sometimes characterized as a wasteland, but more resemble a forest for the interdependent trio at the sinking heart of Jannis Lenz’s “Oasis,” the German-born, Austrian-trained filmmaker’s
creepy, controlled debut feature. Retreating to the woods surrounding their German hometown, three ostracized high-schoolers create an arcane shared reality that provides them with comfort, support and the opportunity to explore boundaries in a uniquely non-judgmental way. But Lenz’s steady, sorrowful film radiates ambivalence about whether that’s a good thing or whether, in finding each other, these kids will be lost to the world. That’s the thing about forests; you can lose sight of them for the trees.
Lukas (Florian Geißelmann) is a quiet boy: sensitive, artistic, keeps to himself. Basically, all the descriptors that, after the fact, people use to describe a school shooter, apply to him, right down to a rarely seen, perfectly delinquent lop-sided smile. Yet he is not actively unpopular, despite the significant teenage handicap of having a father, Martin (Godehard Giese) — Lukas’ sole parent since the not-too-long-ago death of his mother — who is a teacher at his school. It is only when Lukas befriends big, wounded Andi (Anton Petzold) the son of a soldier recently posted to the base nearby, that he sees his small store of social capital start to dwindle. It doesn’t bother him too much initially, he can always rely instead on his best friend, Maya (a breakout Mathilda Smidt) who lives, apparently un-parented, in a big, airy house nearby and attends a specialist music school. Maya’s vocal exercises, as her class practise their plosives and sibilants, open the film on an appropriately strange, rhythmic note.
Cinematographer Alexander Dirninger (who also co-wrote the elegantly spare screenplay with Lenz) observes the slow-building action with such cool, detached dispassion that it always takes some time to understand the behavior we’re watching. This habit of withholding — that does get a little wearing during a stretched-out middle third — is unsurprising, given that Lenz apprenticed with some of the major figures from the school of severe Austrian formalism (his movie could be glibly summarized as “Michael Haneke goes to High School.”) It’s a few scenes before we realize, for example, that when Lukas methodically cuts the shoulder pads out of his dead mother’s blouses and tapes them around his torso, he is not acting on some dysfunctional grieving instinct. He’s constructing a homemade flak vest, for when he meets up with Andi in the woods to shoot paintball guns at each other. His taped-up tee is not exactly Kevlar. Lukas comes home with a livid, baseball-sized bruise blossoming on his shoulder.
After that first paintball-gun chase, Lukas and Andi sit in a field smoking cigarettes and barely talking, letting the whomp-whomp from the nearby wind turbines fill the companionable silence — the sound design, by Nora Czamler and Benedikt Palier (who also provides the disquieting, echoey score) is particularly superb. But there is a lot going unspoken here. That very day a video has started to circulate on social media, of Andi being cruelly humiliated by his classmates. In the coming days, he reacts to the mounting taunting with occasional defensive outbursts, that inevitably bring him to the attention of the school authorities.
Lukas, likely afraid of being targeted himself, rarely intervenes (“Why don’t you ever do anything?” Andi will later shout at him). But he does introduce Andi to Maya and somehow, the three of them gel, gently coaxing each other into more and more peculiar, unsavory, sex-adjacent-but-never-actually-sexual games of touching and biting and bruising. Less of an outlet for their inarticulate feelings of shame and anger, these rituals become an inlet, leading them deeper into (possibly unhealthy, but who’s to say?) emotional co-dependence, while estranging them further from their peers.
Martin is alarmed by his son’s surly withdrawal from their amicable father-son dinners and impromptu Guitar Hero sessions. But then all of the adults involved — Martin, the principal, the school staff and the concerned parents of Lukas and Andi’s classmates — believe they know their kids’ best interests, while only having the vaguest notion of what really interests their kids. Lenz’s film draws a faint parallel between the group dynamics among the teens and those among their purported guardians, as though the instinct to make yourself more integral to the herd by picking on its most vulnerable member is one that does not lessen with age, it simply metastasizes into a more sophisticated variant.
In an effort to sway his sympathies away from Andi, the school counselor (Britta Hammelstein) tells Lukas “Sometimes the victim role is a personal choice” which is an insane statement for a therapy professional to make. But no matter, like all efforts to separate them, it only brings the threesome closer together, and toward ever more intimate acts of mutual masochism and self-harm. Are these games a valuable pressure-valve that can defuse antisocial behavior or are they an early stage of escalation to actual, non-consensual, outward-directed violence? Are they an exorcism or are they practise? As Lenz’s taut, self-contained narrative releases some of its rigor in a rather underwhelmingly open-ended final act, it does give one to wonder what happens to this little club’s arcane rites and secret ceremonies when the safe, accepting space that fostered them turns out to be less oasis than mirage.
