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Austria · 2019
1h 48m
Director Marie Kreutzer
Starring Valerie Pachner, Pia Hierzegger, Mavie Hörbiger, Michelle Barthel
Genre Drama
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Lola controls her personal life with the same ruthless efficiency she uses in her job as a high-powered business consultant. No one knows about her older sister Conny or her family's history of mental illness. But when a tragic event forces Conny back into Lola's life and her secrets begin to unravel, Lola's grip on reality seems to slip away.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
This is at once an accessible art house drama about Lola’s emotionally frayed sisterly and amorous ties and a clinically observed portrait of a 21st-century woman trying to stay afloat in a ruthlessly profit-oriented economy where feelings are the enemy of efficiency.
The Ground Beneath My Feet is essential viewing for our anxiety-ridden times.
San Francisco Chronicle by David Lewis
The Ground Beneath My Feet consistently serves as a powerful showcase for the talented Pachner, who manages a performance that is both distant and achingly vulnerable.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
This is crafty, first-rank filmmaking.
Without proselytizing, and without distracting from the main thrust of her gripping, intelligent psychodrama, Kreutzer and her predominately female team have created a story both knottily specific and usefully general in its understanding that for many women, an ultimately untenable level of watchful self-control is the price of ambition.
There’s a discourse going on here about family and memory, about what we lose if we turn ourselves into work machines who can “pull a 48” (go for 48 hours without sleep) that leeches subtly into the fabric of Kreutzer’s psycho-drama, buoyed by a fine use of setting, camera focus and colour.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The transgressive threat approaches and recedes like thunder, leaving us with a study in loneliness.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
Kreutzer, who wrote the screenplay, proves especially adept, in conjunction with editor Ulrike Kofler, at the natural suspense of pinging between Lola’s professional and personal lives, and where the vulnerabilities in one bleed into the other. It’s a steady tension that’s greatly enhanced by Kreutzer’s spatially conscious visual style.
The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide
This oppressive, atmospheric Austrian drama takes the kind of alpha female high achiever familiar from Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, but undermines her with splinters of Hitchcockian paranoia.
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