Lukas Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa doesn’t so much tell a story as it infects you with one. It’s a film that seeps into your bloodstream like a slow toxin—cold, pastoral, and quietly insane. The mountains hum. The goats watch. The snow falls thick as judgment. If The Witch was about repression and hysteria, Hagazussa is about decomposition and delirium. It’s not a movie for everyone. It’s a movie for people who stare too long into the fog and start to see shapes staring back. Albrun (Aleksandra Cwen), our doomed goat-herder heroine, is less a protagonist than a vessel—an open wound of a woman carrying centuries of superstition on her back. When her mother dies early, covered in snakes like some grotesque saint of pestilence, it’s less tragedy than prophecy. The film doesn’t rush to explain anything. It doesn’t care if you’re lost. In Feigelfeld’s world, logic is for city folk; out here, all that matters is rot and ritual. Let’s be clear: this movie is gorgeous. Every frame looks like it was painted by a lunatic monk on the verge of frostbite. The Alps stretch out like frozen graveyards; the interiors are candlelit crypts, flickering with decay. The cinematography by Mariel Baqueiro turns mud and mildew into poetry. You can almost smell the goat dung, the damp wool, the faint copper of blood. And then there’s the sound design—a symphony of breathing, dripping, and whispered blasphemy. The soundtrack, a minimalist nightmare by MMMD, hums and drones like the last prayer of a dying church. It’s as if Hagazussa is daring you to find beauty in filth. Spoiler: you will. Feigelfeld’s film is a quiet indictment of religious persecution, but it never sermonizes. Instead, it whispers, gurgles, and occasionally screams in your face. Christianity here is less a faith than a disease—one that infects through fear and shame. The villagers, those smug little medieval saints, treat Albrun like contagion. To them, she’s not a woman; she’s a symptom. Her isolation isn’t a choice—it’s exile by superstition. The priest gives her back her mother’s skull like it’s a moral object lesson. “To strengthen the faith of a religious community,” he says, “it requires all sacrilege be cleansed.” The line lands like a curse. You can feel centuries of misogyny and paranoia packed into that single phrase. Albrun takes the skull home anyway, decorates it with flowers. When the world calls you filth, sometimes all you can do is make it look holy. There’s a moment in Hagazussa when Albrun, broken beyond repair, eats a mushroom and slips into hell. It’s one of the most beautifully horrifying sequences in modern horror—a pagan fever dream where guilt and desire melt into one thick, black ooze. The boundaries between life, death, and madness dissolve. It’s not about good or evil anymore; it’s about surrender. This is where Feigelfeld shows his true genius. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t explain. He lets Albrun drift into her hallucination like a corpse in a swamp. When she drowns her child, when she communes with skulls and snakes, when she cooks soup out of her grief—none of it feels sensational. It feels inevitable. The film isn’t shocking because it’s grotesque; it’s shocking because it’s intimate. You’re not watching her lose her mind. You’re watching her find her mythology. At its core, Hagazussa is a meditation on how isolation can birth monsters—or saints. It’s about how a woman, shunned long enough, starts to believe the names she’s been called. Witch. Whore. Heathen. Each insult becomes a spell. Albrun’s so-called madness is just self-recognition, filtered through despair. By the time she walks into that pond, cradling her infant like an offering, she’s transcended humanity. Whether she’s cursed or liberated depends on how you see the world. Some will call it horror; others will call it ascension. Me? I call it Tuesday. This isn’t a film that scares in the traditional sense. There are no jump cuts, no monsters leaping from the shadows—just the unbearable sound of your own breath echoing in the dark. It’s the horror of solitude, of being too human in a world that hates humans. It’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God with milk buckets and menstrual blood. For all its bleakness, Hagazussa is also funny in the darkest, most perverse way. Watching Albrun pee in the village’s water supply after years of abuse? That’s punk rock revenge in the Middle Ages. When she tenderly arranges her mother’s skull like a floral centerpiece? That’s domesticity reimagined as madness. Somewhere, a Martha Stewart of the damned is taking notes. Cwen’s performance deserves canonization. She barely speaks, yet every twitch, every trembling inhale, every gaze into the abyss is electric. She doesn’t play Albrun—she embodies her. Watching her unravel is like watching the Alps themselves erode, one emotional landslide at a time. She carries the film the way a saint carries her cross—except this cross bleeds and occasionally hums in ancient tongues. By the final scene, as she lies on the mountaintop and bursts into spontaneous combustion, she’s become both martyr and myth. Fire as redemption. Fire as rot. Fire as the only warmth she’ll ever get. If that’s not cinematic poetry, I don’t know what is. Hagazussa isn’t entertainment—it’s an experience. It crawls under your skin and stays there, whispering in dead languages. It’s slow, deliberate, and utterly uncompromising, a pagan funeral dirge for sanity and salvation alike. Feigelfeld’s debut is less a horror movie than an exorcism of civilization itself. It asks you to sit in the dark, breathe in the mildew, and admit that the line between holiness and madness is thinner than a goat’s bleat. And if you’re brave—or foolish—enough to follow it to the end, you might just find something divine in the decay. Rating: 10 out of 10 drowned babies in the baptismal font of doom.A Fever Dream of Rot and Faith
Beauty in the Blight
Religion as Rotgut
When the Mushrooms Kick In
Witchcraft as Womanhood
A Slow Burn for the Damned
Aleksandra Cwen: The Goat-Herder Messiah
The Verdict: A Beautiful Curse
A haunting, hypnotic masterpiece that proves sometimes damnation is the only kind of freedom worth dying for.
