Part of why I loved the Robert Eggers’ 2016 film, The Witch, is that it’s an almost perfect realization of crafting an environment in the storytelling that makes the film feel less like a period piece, and more like a glimpse into the mind, anxieties, and nightmares of someone from early 17th century New England. The very same can also be said of Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse, the directorial debut of Germany based Austrian filmmaker, Lukas Feigelfeld, which has garnered numerous praise during its festival run. And like The Witch, Hagazussa is not the kind of experience that will be appealing to many people, but it will certainly find its audience.
However, I feel like most of the comparison that will be made between those two films are ultimately very broad – witches as a subject matter, dead serious tone, feminist leanings. What I thought of as I watched Hagazussa was more closer to the filmography of David Lynch. Obviously, the term “Lynchian” has been somewhat recklessly thrown around to describe anything moody and surreal, but I feel it very much applies in the case of Hagazussa.
Despite the reputation, most films by David Lynch have a fairly clear and cohesive plot that just so happens to have diversions into the unreal, achieved through ominous visuals, bold sound design, and creating an oppressive atmosphere, so they end up feeling far more confusing than they actually are. Feigelfeld’s film operates on a very similar wavelength.
The story is reasonably simple. We first meet a mother (Claudia Martini), living alone in the outskirts of a village in the Austrian Alps in the 15th century. She only has her young daughter, Albrun (Celina Peter). The mother is often taunted and threatened by the local villagers because they believe she is a witch, for reasons that unclear, and probably done so on purpose. Unfortunately for Albrun, her mother becomes ill, and dies, leaving her orphaned. We jump to 20 years in the future where Albrun has a young baby girl of her own, also living alone, and similarly deals with the mockery and judgement of the locals, at least until a friendly face shows up in the form of Swinda (Tanja Petrovsky), a woman who tries to befriend Albrun.
I basically described almost two-thirds of the film with just that. Despite a relatively lean hour and forty-two minute runtime, the film moves at a methodical, and at times punishingly slow pace, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. The film has its own rhythm that’s built upon the often awe-inspiring use of the mountain landscapes, captured beautifully by cinematographer, Mariel Baqueiro, combined with the oppressive and relentlessly droning score by MMMD and the use of sound effects that almost seem like they were designed to be so loud that they began to clip, and were then lowered. It’s an odd choice, but it works effectively, creating a near neverending sense of dread and foreboding.
Another thing that separates this from something like The Witch, which was full of period accurate dialogue, is the fact that this has very few spoken lines. Nearly everything you need to know is expressed through expertly delivered visual storytelling. After all, this clearly isn’t the kind of movie that relies on plot as much as it relies on mood and atmosphere, which it has in spades. And it uses the details within the story to present and comment on the misogyny of the era, placing suspicions on women because they don’t act a certain way, the paranoia of a small town because of religious beliefs, and the terribly ways the trauma can affect the mind when left untreated, which is expressed wonderfully by Celina Peter, who expresses so much pain, horror, and helplessness just through her eyes.
Like I mentioned, Hagazussa is not going to be something that’s for everybody, but if you have an affinity for mood pieces that uses its hallucinatory visuals to tell its story in unconventional ways (and assuming subtitles don’t bother you), this will be one hell of a treat. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I loved the film, but it definitely tapped into something as I watched it, leaving me in a rather agitated state. It’s as far from the kind of mainstream jump scare movies as you can get, but just because it doesn’t have anything that pops out and screams “boo,” it doesn’t mean it won’t get under your skin. This got under my skin, and for the entire time it was on, I was practically transported into a different time and place, and it made me feel all the grim, grit, and terror that came with it.