Gutland (2017)

After an armed robbery at a casino in Cologne, German Jens Fauser flees to the Luxembourgish village of Schandelsmillen, just across the German-Luxembourg border. He pretends to be looking for work as a harvest hand. At first, he is turned away because the harvest is already nearing its end and Germans rarely work as farm laborers. At a village festival, he meets the attractive Lucy, a single mother and the mayor’s daughter. They grow close, and Jens spends the night with her. The next morning, he is offered a job. He is also allowed to live for free in a caravan at the edge of the farm, is given clothes, and is recruited as a trumpeter for the village band, since the position has just become vacant. Everything seems to be heading toward a harmonious integration into village life, and his hideout seems perfect—especially since his two accomplices have also found work as farm laborers in other villages, and the police are looking for a group of three. Jens has buried the loot from the robbery in the woods. The next few weeks pass in bucolic peace. Jens seems to have won acceptance from the village community, which was initially suspicious of him. But before long, Jens begins to suspect that the village is not nearly as idyllic and harmless as it appears. He catches a village boy playing in his caravan. As the boy runs from Jens, he drops a stack of nude photographs, apparently of women from the village. The pictures are amateurishly taken, and the faces are unrecognizable. One night, Jens secretly watches Lucy go to a farm outside the village. The next day, he visits the farm. Food left on the table and in the refrigerator suggests that its resident left the property in a hurry. Lucy explains that she now uses the house as her “island,” a place where she can temporarily escape her dreary everyday life, smoke weed, and daydream. The owner, Georges, had vanished suddenly one day without leaving a message, but nobody misses the unpopular Georges. Jens and Lucy’s affair continues, and they move into the abandoned house. They renovate it, and people in the village wonder where the money for the work is coming from. At a bowling evening, his employer’s wife tries to seduce Jens in the bathroom. She warns him that if they were caught, he would end up in the slurry pit. Jens turns her down. When he is sent into a cornfield, supposedly to look for an animal carcass, he finds himself being pursued by a forage harvester that seems intent on catching up with him and running him over. Looking at the nude photographs once more, Jens realizes that they were taken in this house. In bed, Lucy demands more roughness, asking him to hit and choke her, and calls him “Georges.” Jens searches the farm’s slurry pit and finds Georges’s body. Afraid that the same fate awaits him, he flees in a panic, is chased, and is knocked out by a tranquilizer dart. When he wakes, his mane of hair has been cut off and his beard shaved. The village, however, continues to treat him warmly, and the mayor welcomes him as a son-in-law. From then on, they call him Georges, and he settles into village life. When his former accomplices arrive and, at gunpoint, force Jens and Lucy to look for the hideout in the woods, the money has disappeared. A fight breaks out, and hunters from the village arrive; one of the robbers is shot down. The dogs are set on the other. Jens eventually shoots his former comrade with a rifle handed to him by someone from the hunting party. The two bodies are thrown into the slurry pit. Jens assumes the identity of the dead Georges, continues living with Lucy in Georges’s former house, and plays trumpet in the village band.