Oscars 2024: the magnificent dominance of Sandra Hüller
A number of facets of the Academy Award nominations have taken the headlines, say the supposed snubbing of Margot Robbie for ‘Best Actress’ in Barbie or the fact that the race for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ seemed to be dominated by actors playing characters with the ugliest traits of masculinity. However, one ought not to be ignorant of the remarkable impact of German actor Sandra Hüller on this year’s Oscars.
Hüller has been nominated for ‘Best Actress’ for her incredible performance in Justine Triet’s legal drama Anatomy of a Fall, which itself has earned the nod for a further four awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. In addition to that, she also featured in Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing Holocaust film The Zone of Interest, which also earned five Academy Award nominations, though no personal ones for Hüller.
Quite simply, Hüller has enjoyed just about as good a performative year as any actor could hope for and has emerged as one of her generation’s greatest contemporary European actors. Prior to the release of the aforementioned movies and her newfound international acclaim, Hüller had been well-considered on the European circuit. She performed in Han-Christian Schmid’s 2006 work Requiem, for which she won the Silver Bear for ‘Best Actress’ at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as the well-admired drama Toni Erdman and the historical black comedy Sisi & I.
But it’s The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall that has brought Hüller’s brilliance onto the world stage. In Glazer’s ‘Best Picture’ nominated The Zone of Interest, Hüller effortlessly plays Hedwig, the morally ignorant and blind-sided wife of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. She makes her idyllic home as the self-proclaimed “Queen of Auschwitz”, tending to her perfect garden and house just on the other side of the walls housing the immense atrocities of the infamous concentration camp.
Hedwig is a complex character to play because of her remorselessness and unwavering commitment to her one-time, domestic dream before Hitler’s horrific reign of Germany. However, Hüller more than stands up to the task. She is at once steadfast in her morally oblivious lifestyle, likely representative of so many other women of her kind, and capable of generating a response of repugnant outrage from her audience, who look on at her inaction with unabated fury.
Anatomy of a Fall sees Hüller give a very different but equally impressive performance, one that has rightfully earned recognition and a nomination for ‘Best Actress’. Starring as a writer embroiled in a court case in which she must prove her innocence after being suspected of murdering her husband, Hüller’s performance is one exploring a woman persistently teetering on the verge of mental breakdown.
It feels at points that Hüller is playing four characters at once: a wife with marital issues, a mother with responsibilities to her blind son, a friend to her conflicted friend/lawyer, and, quite simply, a woman accused of uxoricide. The way she is capable not only of switching between the French and English languages with ease but also between these very different internal roles is nothing short of mesmerising.
So in just the space of a year, throwing in her equally brilliant performance in Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & I, Hüller has proven herself to be one of the Academy Award’s most significant prospects. She not only snagged herself a well-earned ‘Best Actress’ nomination but also made an incredible contribution to another ‘Best Picture’ nominee in the shape of The Zone of Interest, too.
2023/2024 has announced Hüller on the international stage in a seriously major manner. With the intensity of a master actor and the capability of performing in several languages other than her native German, don’t be surprised to find European cinema’s new icon continues to deliver more mesmerising performances in a wide range of productions in the years to come.
