Lukas Feigelfeld's Hagazussa is a decidedly creepy horror film set in the Alps during the15th Century. The 2018 film is a fairly impressive debut feature debut from the Austrian writer and director. Hagazussa is visually stunning, but dramatically a little sluggish. The film shows, in four parts, vignettes from the life of a simple goat herder who lives on the fringes of society in a remote cabin. Albrun is an outcast from Christian society and is derided by her neighbors, as her mother was before her, as a witch. When Albrun is raped by a local, she takes her revenge in a fiendishly clever manner. What follows is even more horrifying and the film climaxes in fiery fashion with one of the most striking long shots of recent vintage.
Feigelfeld conjures a past that is both strange and sinister, sometimes at the cost of narrative coherence. What he is able to picture, which should be at the heart of any period horror film set in this period, is the conflict between paganism and Christianity. Interestingly, the parish priest is quite tolerant of the pagan leanings of both Albrun and her mother. He realizes that prescence of an outcast like Albrun only increases the religious fervor of his own flock. Albrun is presented, none too subtly, as a scapegoat for the community at large. Feigelfeld also invests his film with traces of the Lorelei myth, though the analogy is a little murky. As Albrun, Alexsandra Cwen offers a bold and forceful performance in a film with very little dialogue. Hagazussa works better as a visual tone poem than as a straightforward story, but there are enough powerful moments to make me look forward to Feigelfeld's next effort.
No comments:
Post a Comment