In response to a humiliating incident at school, three teenagers develop increasingly bizarre, mutually masochistic bonding rituals in Jannis Lenz's impressively taut and eerie debut. 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.
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