Solvent

Weird, creepy and deeply disconcerting, this English-language Austrian horror film delves into the lingering stain of Nazism as a force for recurring evil.

I didn’t quite know what to make of “Solvent” at first. It’s weird, creepy and deeply disconcerting. It comes at you fast with a lot of hyper-quick edits and disturbing imagery that make you question if you really just saw what you think you did. I’ll say it’s probably not the sort of movie that’s for everybody.

But the more it went along, the more engrossed I became. It’s an Austrian horror film that’s mostly in English, sort of a combination of found-footage scares in the mold of “The Blair Witch Project” and body horror a la “The Substance.” Experimental and boundary-breaking kinda stuff. I felt overwhelmed after, but it sticks with you.

Mostly, its theme is the lingering stain of Nazism as a force for recurring evil — with dread implications that this sort of thinking is spreading across the globe again.

“Solvent” is currently making the festival circuit, so you can’t see it anywhere right now. Hopefully it’ll get attention and earn a release of some sort. It’s exactly the sort of offbeat fare streaming platforms excel at presenting.

Gunner S. Holbrook, an American ex-mercenary, now a sort of treasure-hunter/archivist, brings a research team to a remote Austrian farm that used to belong to a Nazi guard at Chelmno, one of the earliest concentration camps where they tested out the extermination protocols that would be made more infamous at places like Auschwitz and Dachau. Mostly the film is told from his perspective as if he’s shooting the footage, so we never seen Gunner, though Jon Gries provides the voice.

The old man, who wandered into the woods and disappeared a decade early, was a strange cat. The farm is in a dilapidated state with all sort of junk spread around. Wolgang Zinggl also had a penchant for storing his own urine in glass bottles and associating with fascists on the internet.

It’s a little unclear what exactly the group was hoping to find. Zinggl’s grandson, Ernst (Johannes Grenzfurthner), who seems to be growing into just as much of a loon as his grandpops, joins them, no doubt hoping for a trove of Jewish gold or something. But when they go into the cellar of an outbuilding, something bad happens that shuts down the expedition.

The film then picks up some months later, with Gunner returning on his own to continue the investigation. His girlfriend, Krystyna from Poland (Aleksandra Cwen), lost her mind as a result of the events but stays in contact via phone. She will start spouting crazy Germanic-sounding diatribes about liquefying their enemies and such.

Gunner’s own sanity also starts to waver, especially once he starts probing a strange pipe sunk into the earth of the cellar. He sends a wire camera down there and finds some frightening things, and makes some unwise choices that lead to him becoming infecting with the same spirit affecting Krystyna. He even starts talking in German, a language he doesn’t know.

Things go from there. Gunner goes further and further off his rocker, almost like Renfield in “Dracula,” playing about with a mouse and consumed with his own fantastical mutterings — possibly in service to an unseen master.

Strange things also happen with his body, particularly his, ah… more delicate areas. I’ll leave it to you to discover the rest.

“Solvent” is a strange and often scary movie. There are also some moments of humor that, while genuine, I felt detracted from building a sense of foreboding.

Still, the thing that I’ll most take with me from this film is the idea that evil is not something that dies, even when good has seemed to prevail, but goes into the earth, festering and rejuvenating itself, until it’s ready to spring forth again in a new form. It’s a truly horrifying notion, made moreso by the truth of it.