Hagazussa: A Series Of Unfortunate Events

Period pieces are tough to pull off in horror - you’re already asking your audience to suspend one level of disbelief, and then on top of that, setting that particular suspension of disbelief in a setting which requires its own suspension of disbelief, well, all it takes is for one thing to ring false for the whole thing to kind of come crashing down.

From an authenticity standpoint, Hagazussa (subtitled “A Heathen’s Curse”) comes off quite well, but maybe too well. Its commitment to a particular time and place isn’t just in its setting, art direction and dialogue, but in pace as well, and that along with some specific narrative choices ends up robbing it of some of its impact.

It begins with a woman and her young daughter, trudging through the snow, clad in furs and rags. The woman is Martha and her daughter is Albrun, and they’re urged by a passerby to get home before dark, as it’s Twelfth Night. These are people who believe in spirits. But as it transpires, it isn’t spirits they need to worry about - it’s the three men with torches outside their modest cabin, threatening to burn it down - they aren’t spirits, they’re the Christians of 15th century Germany, determined to eradicate heathens such as Martha and Albrun, people who live out in the woods and still use folk medicine and practice the old ways.

It’s already a hard, unforgiving life before you factor in the townsfolk trying to get rid of them, and over the course of a long, dark winter, Martha dies of bubonic plague, her only companion Albrun after the church declares her a lost cause. And then it cuts from Albrun as a little girl in the dead of winter to Albrun as a grown woman in the sunlight of spring. She makes her living tending goats in the wilderness, trying to sell their milk at market, and still being harassed as a witch. It’s a tough, solitary life.

And then she starts hearing voices coming from the woods.

With its antiquated settings and language and focus on life in a harsh and mysterious wilderness, this film easily draws comparisons to The VVitch, but it’s definitely its own beast - it’s much, much less talky, for a start. There’s very little dialogue, much of it brief and halting. A big part of The VVitch was the dynamics of a particular family that had struck out to go it alone, and how those dynamics disintegrated in the wake of a tragedy, leaving the family open to evil’s influence. By contrast, Albrun is all on her own and extremely vulnerable, no family to speak of except her own daughter (named Martha after her mother). With the exception of a young villager named Swinda, nobody will give her the time of day. She’s still seen as a heathen and is persecuted accordingly, so this is more about how loneliness and isolation can have a similar effect to family dysfunction. It’s much more elliptical as well - it’s never clear exactly what’s out in the forest or how much of it is in Albrun’s imagination (unlike The VVitch, which pretty much shows us all its cards pretty early on), and where you could argue for the ending of The VVitch as either tragic or triumphant, this is unremittingly tragic. It’s just as convincing a period piece, though, just one which chooses to leave a lot of what actually happened up to us.

Normally, I like a film that underplays things, but I think in this case, it could stand to turn up the volume a little at points. It’s glacially paced, filled with long stretches of stillness and silence, broken only by spare, minimal exchanges between people and the various things that happen to Albrun (mostly very bad). This can be very effective when done strategically, as making no real distinction between the everyday and atrocity lends the atrocity a certain power that overplaying it would dilute, but that’s when it’s done strategically. As it is, the lack of rising action does lend itself at points to monotony. This is a film that feels very much every second of its 1 hour and 49 minute run time. There’s very little music, just the occasional ambient drone, overlaid over huge panoramic shots of mountains and forests, gray winters, gorgeous springs, and dark, dark nights lit only by fire. It’s monolithic in its minimalism and commitment to a feeling of a steady trudge, but the end result feels a little like just one horrible thing happening to Albrun after another, with the only real rise in pitch being how horrible the next thing is.

And this is what sort of makes this frustrating for me, because I admire films that refuse to just be one jump scare after another - some horror films just sort of feel like someone yelling in your face for an hour and a half - but I think the pacing and refusal to really go there/put the mask on and go “BOO”/go to the fireworks factory ends up hurting this film in the end. Terrible things happen (pretty much entirely to Albrun) over the course of the film, and its relentlessly dispassionate tone do give the isolated moments of atrocity its own power - nothing is telegraphed here, and at points toward the end it goes downright hallucinatory - but across nearly two hours, I think the final result is sort of enervating, and in its denouement reminds me of nothing so much as Dancer In The Dark - terrible things happen to this young woman, witchcraft might be involved, the end, no moral. There are moments that impact you, but they’re sort of muted or muffled by long stretches of silence, endless mountain and forest vistas, and an almost perverse absence of tension in places (to be fair, this is balanced by a fair amount of tension in other places). I felt enough for Albrun that I wanted to see shit really pop off, and being denied that catharsis is certainly a commitment to historical authenticity and a particular aesthetic, but it makes for sort of an unsatisfying film.

IMDB entry
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