It is also more than just another ambiguous weird movie with more questions than style. Rather than resulting in David Lynchian disorientation, “Dreamland’s” jargon juggles a bunch of jumbled pieces that make a mess more than they ever mesh.

Hopes of that nervous energy continuing, however, are dampened by a resulting character study that isn't ominous so much as monotonous. Nearby villagers ostracize both women as witches, although whether they truly are or not isn’t definitively spelled out. © Copyright 2020 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. Interpretation: Snakes and bogs are connected with the dead of her mother/the underworld/the devil, the blood suggest rebirth. Albrun hallucinates that her mother's corpse is in the bog with snakes crawling over her. Does she have to pay whomever or whatever grants her the power to speak a curse in the first place? BLOOD – Albrun smiles at her baby when she sees two undertakers piling up bodies of dead villagers. She could have been raising the baby for months in isolation and in a drug-fueled haze drowned her baby and returned home. I liked the movie, it's right up my alley, but it could've had a far greater emotional impact if the director cared to actually edit himself (and the film, of course).

“Hagazussa” exemplifies a movie made almost exclusively out of mood instead of a stable script. I just watched the movie and I'm a bit lost.

You might be jolted back by the sight of Albrun masturbating while sensually milking a goat. Yet once you know its origin, an explanation immediately forms as to why the movie dismisses convention and embraces experimentation like only a fledgling filmmaker would dare to do. Seeing the corpses of mean girl + rapist makes Albrun feel triumphant. Maybe it was something to protect them, or a way to get revenge? It was never "cut" t…, Blu-ray/DVD New Releases - October/November 2020.

Villagers continue shunning Albrun until a woman named Swinda takes an unexpected interest in her. Swinda tells her, on the way to see the priest that she could not live all alone with a child, but no one questions leaving the infant for hours all alone in the cabin. Albrun collapses to the ground and her body spontaneously combusts. An intense, visually stunning scene takes place shortly after finding her goat dead that features a perversion of baptism. Naturally, she responds with surprised gratitude to unsolicited overtures of friendship from Swinda (Tanja Petrovsky), a vivacious local about her age. Editor Jorg Volkmar’s measured pacing — more inexorable than sluggish — a droning score by Greek duo MMMD, Nikas Kammertons’ detailed sound design, Marcel Weber’s discreet visual effects, and Dana Dumann’s production design for the few interiors (including an eerily skull-lined church) all further heighten the atmospheric impact of this unsettling vision. Aleksandra Cwen(Albrun) weaves an entire world with scarcely more than ten lines in the whole film. The entire green swamp scene could be interpreted in many ways. The use of maggots as a symbol for death lend credence to the theory that the baby has been dead a while, or never lived at all. While plague stalks the land, paranoid peasants swap cautionary folk tales about evil spirits, pagans, Jews and other outsiders.

Depending on if you are buying the miscarried baby plot point there was no baby at all, and thus there was nothing to neglect. She's in shock, the man is huge, her only friend and crush just betrayed her, if she makes a sound it may be worse for her and even if she were to escape, she could be killed. Kudos are also earned by Cwen, whose committed performance manages to feel fully dimensionalized despite her having almost no dialogue to work with. There are three dead females. One of the most recent horror movies to polarize audiences was Robert Eggers’ “The Witch,” that creepy 1630s period piece with Old English dialogue, an iconic sinister goat, and a terrifying finale. Boy, I can't say I've seen too many horror films lately that I actually hated, especially with this level of acting and cinematography, but man It just felt like a feel bad film in slow motion that was more focused on trying to disturb the audience than build any real sense of fear or dread.

One might be able to become lost in the movie’s immersive artistry if “Hagazussa” wasn’t so uneventfully dull. After last week’s post recommending the movie Hagazussa, I was excited to check the film out since I love slow burning horror flicks. His taste for psychedelic horror in nature likely comes down to personal preference, but I found numerous shots plainly ugly, if not wasteful of his fledgling ambitions. I'm not sure if Aulbrun's mother was a witch or not but she did succumb to something awful rather quickly after whispering something to herself just after they were threatened by the village folk.