Score: 3.5 / 5
Experimental horror of a surprisingly high order, this movie is what happens if you cross Robert Eggers's The Witch with Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. Folk horror as if it were directed by Terrence Malick. Nothing is quite what you expect or what it seems, and even the most obvious of symbols is probably more. Case in point: the opening shot in a cat's perspective as it moves across the ground is, in fact, the feline form taken by a witch, the film's antagonist. Old Maid Maria is a local legend, a boogeyman in Macedonia in the 19th century. Why this film chooses this setting, we may never know, but it is dedicated to telling its tale like David Lowery's folk dramas, and I was all too willing to see where it took us.
She's pursuing a newborn, though her reason is never clear; reasons never really matter in these Grimm-like tales of rural witches and naughty children and absent or inconsequential parents. Thus the newborn's mother foolishly offers the witch her child only after its sixteenth birthday. Then the witch -- played by Anamaria Marinca beneath burn prosthetics that look not unlike Freddy Krueger -- agrees and disappears into one of her many animal forms. She'll be back, and all too soon. The film skips ahead to the child's sixteenth birthday, when a sentient eagle appears in the cave where the mother has hidden her precious daughter (in a scene strongly reminiscent of the Rapunzel legend).
From here, the fairytale mostly ends, though the fantasy has only just begun. This is not a journey toward freedom for young Nevena, but rather toward her own identity. She is soon turned into a witch by Maria, who tries to teach her how witches behave; Nevena doesn't like killing small mammals for food and prefers playing with them. Maria, frustrated, feels she has wasted her (apparently one and only) chance to "procreate" and make a witch apprentice, so she abandons Nevena to fend for herself. Like characters in Orlando or even Frankenstein, Nevena must put on the guises of other people to learn the ways of the world. Specifically, she learns how to pull out their intestines after she has killed them and put them inside herself before she changes form. This is when the movie really kicks into "Malick mode," when Nevena's voiceover narration embraces abstraction and the editing and cinematography are more interested in the impressionistic visuals of her surroundings rather than delve into her actual headspace or experience.
She jumps from body to body -- killing as she goes, sometimes from self-defense or even on accident -- and even experiences and likes life as a man. Interestingly, the second half of the film is largely concerned with this in gendered terms, as Nevena learns how she is treated by men and women as both a man and a woman; if the film has a message, I'd hazard it targets toxic masculinity and its social effects on gendered societal roles. It doesn't have much to say on that front, but it's a fascinating direction for this movie to go, and thankfully it never reaches into social horror or, heaven forbid, gender exploitation to get its points across. I don't think I could have handled rape or other real-life horrors in this kind of film, especially when the protagonist is mostly mute. Instead, the film smartly and devotedly operates (again, not unlike Orlando) beyond the cishet language we would ordinarily use to describe the narrative. And while it doesn't really have much to say, ultimately, it showcases the talents of gifted filmmakers -- and its first-time director -- in a film most men wouldn't have the balls to make.
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