Ready for the “only at Sundance” can you find a story about a 19th century blood sucking witch terrorizing small villages in Macedonia told in Terrence Malik-like philosophic narration something that you can’t turn away from confession? Guilty. And I don’t really know why. I’m not particularly a fan of folk horror and I find the cross gender simultaneous perspective approach to storylines increasingly tedious and trope. I couldn’t even get into The Affair or Orlando. Nevertheless, this feature debut by Goran Stolevski is an unforgettable take on a vampire witch fable.
The story begins when a terrified village woman makes a deal with a witch who is about to kill her baby. The woman convinces the witch the child will be more use to her alive than a meager short term snack, and promises to let the witch take her on her 16th birthday if the witch will only let the mother raise her. The witch accepts and the woman does her best to hide the girl but the witch ultimately returns and turns the teenager into a subservient witch.
This particular kind of witch is a shapeshifter, with the ability to take the form of another life. The only catch is to take another’s form, the witch must take the life and mix some of victim’s organs within its own. So, the teenager gets a coming of age treatment via organ harvesting of her victims. With each victim’s unique perspective and life experience, so learns the teenage witch until ultimately, like robots in sci-fi films, we see if our monster can transcend her creator to be more human than the humans.
The film’s production quality is reduced by abrupt shifts between surreal yet minimalist gore scenes, and oversimplified village sequences. However, the life transfers are captured in a lyrical mosaic of landscape and poetic narrations at their most effective when they evolve to center on the womanhood of the villages. It is at this point the fable is deconstructed, but not defining. Or is it? The cast including Noomi Rapace and Sara Kimoska give new meaning to “all in.”
