Rating: 4/5
Hooptober 7.0 | 2/32 | Countries 2/6 | Germany
A mother and her daughter, Albrun, live in the 15th-century Austrian Alps, 100 years after the black plague. They are goat herders who live on the outskirts of town.
Outside their house, masked figures holding torches stand a few yards from the house. The mother slips back inside. Immediately, rattles and knocks against the walls. Torchlight passes through every window.
You should be burned down, you witch. We’ll get you.
The following day, the mother and Albrun gather limbs for the fire. The mother, horrified, looks around before feinting into the snow. She’s grown sick — growths cover her body reminiscent of several plagues.
Over the following days, her condition deteriorates. As Albrun has her first period, her mother tries to SA Albrun before running outside. Albrun finds her dead in the woods.
15 Years Later Albrun tends to her goats and has a confusing, possibly sexual relationship with them. She has a baby daughter of her own, but no father to the child that we know.
A woman named Swinda shows an unusual kindness to Albrun. Swinda comes to her home and asks her to come see the priest with her.
They enter an ossuary. The priest talks of filling people with light and scrubbing the village of sacrilege. He holds her mother’s skull, polished with roses painted on it.
He gives it to Albrun with a warning against embracing the darkness. Albrun places the skull in the corner of her cottage.
The movie is a portrait of an abused and traumatized woman who is deeply isolated. Whether or not darkness lurks in the woods isn’t important to her experience — only that she believes it and succumbs to it.
The landscape is beautiful and bitter — a land where the line between peace and violence is invisible. Shooting on location does loads for the atmosphere.
The film feels serene until abject horror bleeds in. Sometimes, scenes have an unknowable dread to them — we feel like something bad will happen, but we can’t point to any reason.
The bass in this is insane — I had to nearly turn it off to keep my house from shaking. When the score isn’t playing, the sound of the wind is the only thing heard most of the time. Lines of dialogue are few.
A lot of puking in this one, so be warned.
Overall, this film is devastating and melancholic. Unbelievable that this is a student film.
** Stray Thoughts / Spoilers ***
- Gorgeous cat!
- I think Albrun fucks these goats. At least she loves that goat’s milk a bunch.
- It always feels weird when actors put their nipples in an actor baby’s mouth. Wouldn’t that confuse them?
- Swinda seems like she has ulterior motives. Like she’s only friends with Albrun to convert her or something.
- So Swinda occupies Albrun by letting some villager rape her? What the fuck?
- Why did they kill her fucking goat? Why would you mess with someone you thought was a witch?
- Poison the well. Brutal
- Just gonna take some mushrooms I found and freak out in the woods with my baby
- What the fuckkkkk
- Dude, don’t swim in bog water
- Is that snake talking like her mom?
- oh the skill duh
- That’s a dead baby
- Mother’s face superimposes on her’s
- Is she… eating her baby?
- I’m guessing she has a similar experience to her mother