Rev., Jul 24, 2019.
This is a German movie about a lonely young woman in 15th century Switzerland trying to cope with life alone as she seems to be ostracized from village life on account of her mother. Things start off with her mother holding down the fort of their small and very rustic, isolated cottage in the mountains as some village men all done up in protective devil-taxidermy-like costumes and torches to force her out, because she is a witch. At this point in the movie, Albrun, the main character, is still a little girl, struggling to understand. Things get worse when the mother gets sick and for that we are served up gross shots of strange black buboes under her armpits (I think that is the black death), being washed by a priest or nurse, not pretty. There is also a very creepy scene when she agrees to lie in bed with her sick mother, but it is as if her mother’s unconscious life force just begin to paw at her and suck up her life energy, there is even implication of a sexual attack, so the daughter wiggles her way out, to escape. In any case, the mother ends up dead covered in snakes at a site nearer the village, thus ending the first part of the movie. We now switch to maybe ten years later when Albrun is a stern, skeletal, frail and deeply introverted young woman living alone in a void of ostracism from the village. She has one talk with the local cleric who houses an ossuary of lots of bones and skulls which kind of freaks her out, but she does find her mother’s skull so takes it home, paints it, or it is painted, and sets it up in the corner of the same inherited hut in the corner, as if a cult altar. The main problem with Albrun’s life is its loneliness, and we see how this implodes upon her as she indulges in some masturbation which the titles nicely characterize as “moaning towards coming,” she comes with her face in the pillow, I suppose it is sex, but it’s pretty limited. Somehow, we are never shown how, Albrun also ends up pregnant, so spends a good deal of time raising a baby. One day a local girl of a somewhat more worldly manner invites her to walk in the mountains, they adore the scenery that they get to live in, she acknowledges that, on that score, in spite of severe survival hardships, they are lucky. But then it turns out the woman was orchestrating her rape as she gets a local man to rape Albrun, with no apparent purpose other than pure malice. Albrun is so upset that she decides to take revenge, so we see her walk with a close-up of a dead rat by her hip as she then drops it into the falls, the town’s water supply, soon after to see the cleric by her place hauling out naked dead women, who have caught the plague on account of her. Then there is an interesting scene where she takes off her top and washes herself in front of us, she has a good figure, which always surprises one, that people way back had bodies pretty much exactly as now, but I think we are meant to feel that, as she pulls a shift over her bony bent back, then exposes her full hanging breasts, then she washes, it’s all meant to symbolize some sort of coming out in terms of her own body culture. In this new period, she spends more time just lolling in the woods, but on one occasion she is struck by a mushroom that looks an awful lot like intimate human body parts so she picks one and eats it, it turns out to be a sort of pre-LSd, which leaves her for hours paralyzed on the forest floor gazing up at the kaleidoscope of the canopy, a standard trope, somewhat buzzed, but she also sees her feet covered in maggots, so carrying her baby she has a vision of a pond as a meadow so walks into it and by that accidentally drowns her baby. Then, wide eyes afire, she goes down deep under the pond, and it is quite strange visually in a movie that spends so much time in the panoramic mountains that we find hallucinatory reality deep in the murk of a weedy pond. The movie’s obtuseness, however, continues, even there, with a splash of blood let out, of no clear sense, with only some, if not bad, hallucinatory visuals, it remains, for its wild premise, a muted trip. In any case, sometime later she wakes up in her cabin, then is shocked to see that she killed her own baby. For all this time, the mother’s skull has been in the corner, sometimes, I think, a-whispering, now there is an implication that the mother has through that skull retained her witchy power, because the mother appears, Albrun, well, I don’t know what she does, but for the ending the camera pulls back to far off range to watch her lie down at dawn on a mountaintop and when the morning sun hits her she spontaneously combusts into flame, the end. Though I think this is a tale of epigenetic passing on of witchcraft in the family, the mother however in this case never giving way to Albrun, it is hard to say as the movie overuses obtuse slowness and quietness as fetishes to all but force oneself to appreciate slow burn “pure cinema” when the truth is, if one considers this a horror movie (and that is an issue as simply describing the folkloric beliefs of a traditional people is not horror, something has to go wrong, or to the dark side, this barely, with the mother’s involvement, counts) then the most important thing is instrumentalizing the tropes, when, in this effort, it was almost as if they wanted to use slowness to mute and vacate the tropes, hoping that would make for a better, ie arty horror. It doesn’t quite work that way, nonetheless, for the LSd angle, and scenes, then the finale, a good rating.
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