I'll Be Home for Christmas

It's a Grimm world for peasants in Stefan Ruzowitzky's wry, relentless parable of social injustice and fate. If the George Grosz-like burghers don't kill your spirit, then the mysterious old crones and spooky spirits of the dank, haunted countryside will. As Severin, the film's cryptic narrator and "the outsider," tells his pal Lukas when the latter suggests moving to America, "For those born wretched, life is hard everywhere."

But Severin, Lukas, and the other peasants working on the farm seem to have caught a break when their mean master is murdered and it's learned he left all his property to them. They form an ad hoc commune, much to the annoyance of their neighboring landowners, who see the land as theirs and the neo-farmers as "uppity"; and it's only a matter of time before Severin's pronouncement proves true again. Underscoring its aloof hopelessness with long shots of dreary landscapes and close-ups of pitiless oppressors, The Inheritors balances with uneven grace its themes of revolution and atavistic determination, its dourness countered by occasional stylistic crotchets and Erik Satie on the soundtrack. Set in the '30s, the film makes no effort to specify its class struggles in a historical context but instead settles them in the creepy, complacent confines of a scary bedtime story.

-- Peter Keough