Memories of a Forest (2026) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for cold reactions
Take a Drink: for writing or talk of writing
Take a Drink: for family fights
Take a Drink: for tractor rides
Do a Shot: when a tree is cut down
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
The TIFF Discovery Section is where you go to find that “I knew them before they made it big” director. Katharina Rabl may be just such a find.
Memories of a Forest follows Frieda (Julia Windischbauer), a young Austrian woman who returns home from Vienna to attend the funeral of her grandmother and finds she’s inherited a small plot of forest, but that her family’s financial circumstances are more precarious than she’d imagined.
A Toast
From her mother’s frazzled state, it quickly becomes clear to Frieda that her family is struggling with the cost of the funeral. However, Mom has very forceful feelings against when the daughter suggests the sensible thing- selling the small plot of forest that was her inheritance from her grandmother (and practically the only asset the woman had, it appears). She never imagined she’d be the one willed it in the first place, but her grandmother and mother meant for it to continue to be passed down.
Something must be done, though, so Frieda enlists the young (married) caretaker of the forest with whom their reunion makes it clear she has some history to help her cut down some trees to sell. When it rains it pours- Rabl is adept at showing how economic hardships compound even for seemingly firmly established families. The tree she cuts down is infested with an invasive beetle, and if it spreads the rest of the forest will be worthless.
So she puts her nearly done dissertation on hold to cut down any trees she finds with beetles, at first to sell, then to just try to contain the infestation. You can’t help but wonder whether this serves as a convenient excuse for something she’s more ambivalent about than she lets on. Rabl gets great work out of her entire cast as the family secrets start to spill out, particularly Windischbauer, and keeps a firm grasp on tone and unshowy but excellently rendered aesthetics.
Beer Two
It takes a little while to get your bearings on who these people are in relation to each other dramatically and what their motivations really are. You have to do a lot of extrapolating from small comments and gestures at the beginning.
Verdict
Memories of a Forest examines the difficulties in returning home, but also the pull of it versus the challenge of making a new life.
