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by Isa Willinger
grade: 7.5
No Mercy is a long and exciting journey through many years of film history, focusing specifically on films made by women, while addressing important and topical issues. At the Viennale 2025.
Many voices, many perspectives
Willinger, who, after completing her film studies, was determined to meet her, travelling all the way to Odessa to finally speak with her. It was not easy for Muratova to make “free” films, to deal with subjects often considered “problematic”, to feel, in short, free to express herself through images on the movie screen that are now rightfully part of film history. According to Muratova, it is women who make the most harsh films. And so, starting from this statement, Willinger made the exciting documentary No Mercy, which premiered in Austria at the Viennale 2025.
No Mercy, therefore, is a long and exciting journey through many years of film history, which, as we can well imagine, focuses its attention precisely on films made by women. Filmmakers such as Ana Lily Amirpour, Catherine Breillat, Céline Sciamma, Alice Diop, but also Monika Treut and Virginie Despentes, just to name a few, make their appearance on the movie screen from time to time and, through interviews and clips from their most famous films, contribute to deepening the concept expressed by Muratova at the time, while also addressing rather important and topical issues, such as violence against women and the fact that, nowadays, there is all too often talk of the “female gaze”, both in cinema and in other sectors.
With a particularly dynamic staging and fast-paced rhythm, the director’s voiceover telling us her story and a precise elliptical structure, No Mercy immediately revealed itself to be an extremely sharp and intelligent documentary, a decidedly topical and rather urgent film, which, skilfully avoiding dangerous clichés, stands out among numerous other productions that deal, each in their own way, with the issue of women in the society in which we live, thanks above all to its own distinct personality.
Isa Willinger, for her part, has masterfully and maturely handled a universal topic (many topics) starting from her personal story, but without allowing strong emotions to take over the entire work (particularly interesting, in this regard, are the parallelisms drawn between her own story and Muratova’s). And, given the semantic (and visual) power of what is discussed and analysed each time, this interesting No Mercy could even be compared to a rollercoaster ride. A necessary and essential documentary that provides us with plenty of food for thought and which, at the end of the screening, will undoubtedly give rise to numerous debates.
Original title: No Mercy
Directed by: Isa Willinger
Country/year: Germany, Austria / 2025
Running time: 104’
Genre: documentary
Screenplay: Isa Willinger
Cinematography: Bernadette Paaßen, Siri Klug, Doro Götz
Produced by: Tondowski Films, FlairFilm, ZDF, ORF