This article is the expanded version of my review that appeared on
Set The Tape was the directorial debut of Lucas Feigelfield, who also wrote the film. Initially released in 2018 in Germany, it's now receiving a wider home release.
Hagazussa follows the life of Albrun, a girl living in a remote cabin with her mother. The two of them are outcasts from the local community, and shunned as witches. When Albrun's mother gets sick she eventually passes away, leaving the child alone to fend for herself. The film then jumps forward to Albrun as a young woman, with a baby of her own. Still living in her mothers remote cabin, she begins to experience increasingly strange and disturbing events.
In all honesty, I don't really know how to start talking about
Hagazussa. I'd heard a little about the film before I had the chance to see it, and one of those things was that a lot of people felt it was similar in many regards to
The Witch by Robert Egger. I can see why this parallel is made; both films centre on people in very isolated, wooded locations in times past who are struggling with supposed supernatural forces. Both films are slow burns that rely as much on lingering camera shots and the sounds to build tension as anything else in the story. They're also both open to interpretation as to what actually happens, whether events are influenced by the paranormal, or if they're stories of young women abused to breaking point.
Whilst I enjoyed The Witch and found it to be an interesting film, it didn't engage me or disturb me in the same way that
Hagazussa did. I say engage, but that's not really accurate. I found it a little hard to stay with the film at times. The story is very slow, and one could argue that a good portion of the movie could be cut down and tightened to give it a better pace, but then I think it would lose a lot of what makes it a creepy experience. The fact that I had to work to stay in the movie, that I had to make myself stay invested did, in retrospect, add something to the experience.
Hagazussa is a story that you don't want to experience. It's designed to be off putting and disturbing. You want to turn it off and leave it alone because it gets under your skin. And whilst you have the power to do that, you can just stop, Albrun can't run away from what's happening to her. She's stuck in these experiences, and you feel like you have to stay there with her. The film made me want to run away from it, yet I also wanted to see what would happen to its lead next, a kind of morbid curiosity. I'm not even sure if this could be down to feeling sorry for the character and wanting to see it through to the end to see if things went well for her, because the film never gave the sense that there would be a happy ending.
The very first scenes in the film show Albrun's childhood, her isolated upbringing with her mother. These scenes are probably the most easily understood and interpreted part of the film, as events seem to play out how they appear. We learn through these scenes that the two women are pretty much hated by others in the local community, and we see the impact this has on Albrun. After her mother's death things become worse for Albrun, and could be considered one of the leading events in her awful adulthood.
When we next see Albrun as an adult she's still at her mothers cabin, having carried on alone from her childhood. She doesn't interact well with the people in town, and is openly mocked and ridiculed by the local children. You begin to get a sense that Albrun has never really learned to talk to people, and that she's as sheltered and naive as when she herself was a child. You begin to question how she has a child because of this, how she could have had a romantic relationship if she's so hated by those around her and appears incapable of even talking to people. A possible explanation for this is given by one of the local women, who makes a comment about heathens who attack lone women in the mountains, raping them and making them pregnant. A possible rape would add to Albrun's difficulties with people, and explain why she refuses to answer questions about her child's father.
Over the course of the film we see Albrun try to make strives towards making an actual friendship with one of the local women, Swinda, but this attempt ends in a brutal scene where Swinda holds Albrun down to be raped by one of the local men. Following this moment Albrun finds that her goats have all been stolen, save one who's left as a slaughtered warning. Enraged by these events Albrun takes revenge on the town by throwing a dead rat in their water supply, and peeing in it; which results in a disease sweeping through them.
After seeing that she's caused the deaths of innocents, Albrun goes deep into the woods and eats a mushroom that sends her on a hallucinogenic trip that results in her drowning her baby. When she comes out of her trip she sees what she has done puts her baby's body into her cooking pot, where she stews and eventually eats it.
This is without a doubt one of the most disturbing and affecting moments of the film. The events themselves are enough to make you feel uncomfortable, but the long lingering takes on Albrun as she's overwhelmed by her actions are awful enough, but the shots of what she does afterwards are even worse. It could have been shot in a way that implied what she did, or even begin to show the audience before cutting away, but instead the camera lingers as she brings the meat to her mouth and begins to eat her own daughter. Following this, she leaves her home and waits for the dawn on top the mountain, where the sunlight causes her to burst into flames.
The reason that I've gone into the story so deeply here, that I've spoken openly about spoilers, is because you need to know what happens in order for me to talk about how open to interpretation the events are.
Taken literally, Albrun poisoned the town with her waste and a dead rat, causing disease, before she went on a trip and accidentally killed her baby. Then she tries to dispose of the evidence by eating her. This makes some kind of sense, and is probably what some people would take from the film, but fails to explain the final scenes of her bursting into flames.
Another possibility is that Albrun actually used magic to curse the town. This comes more into play thanks to what happens afterwards, as the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms and eating of babies are heavily connected to witchcraft lore. Mushrooms such as the redcap Fly Agaric appear in many old drawings and pictures of witches, and some believed their hallucinogenic properties were used to create experiences such as flying, or changing into other creatures. The presence of some hallucinogens are also used to explain why some areas broke out into witch hysteria, such as the possibility of ergot being baked into bread being behind the Salem witch trials. The eating of babies was also said to be one of their practices, and baby fat was said to be used in potions and ointments.
By eating the mushrooms and the cooking and devouring of her own baby Albrun is giving in to her witch heritage, performing the practices that her mother taught her as a child. This could explain why she bursts into flames at the end. Perhaps it's because she is now a witch and the suns light physically harms her, or it could be symbolic of her own self and her old life burning away as she embraces who she really is and becomes a witch.
There's also a possibility that Albrun is being haunted by the spirit of her mother, who she keeps hearing during the course of the film, before finally seeing in the climactic moments. If her mother was a witch, or even if not and the supernatural exists within this world there's a possibility that this spirit has been with her for her years alone on the mountain, slowly poisoning her daughters mind and twisting her into something else. Albrun's mother was left to die by the village, after years of being tormented by them, so why not use her daughter to get revenge against them from beyond the grave.
Another, and very real interpretation, and one that immediately jumped out at me, was that Albrun was just a women broken by years of loneliness and abuse, that all of the awful things she's done have slowly worn her down and led to the awful events that she experiences. She had to grow up isolated with her mother, who the locals scorned and hated. She was sexually assaulted by her sick mother, who then died and left her to grow up alone. She is raped at least once as we see in the film, but could have been raped before this. She is betrayed by the one friend she thinks she has. She causes the deaths of innocent people in a moment of rage. Her livelihood is stolen away from her. She accidentally kills her own child. All of this would be more than enough to cause a psychological break within the poor woman, and her burning on the mountain top could easily represent the destruction of her sanity.
I've also seen the possibility floated online that her baby may already be dead before the scene where Albrun appears to drown her, and that her discovering the body is really her coming to the realisation that her daughter was already long dead. This does fit too, as there are a few times where scenes make a different kind of sense see through this lens, such as her daughter refusing to drink from her breast. It could also explain why Albrun seems to leave her daughter alone for long stretches, and why she doesn't let anyone see her. Her child even seems smaller and more decomposed than she should when Albrun discovers her body, hinting that she's been dead for a long time.
I honestly don't know which of these ideas I like the most, or even which one fits with the film I saw. I don't know if there were dark forces at work. I don't know if Albrun was a witch, or just a woman with a broken mind. I'm not even sure if everything that I saw was real or figments of her mind. I find myself questioning so much of the film beyond just the ending. Part of me wants to go back and watch it again, to try and see if I can make a decision or find more hints that could help me reach a conclusion, but I also feel like I don't ever want to watch the film again.
The events depicted in
Hagasuzza are disturbing and unsettling. The director uses shots and music that adds to those feelings and compounds them. The result is one of the most unsettling pieces of film I think I've ever seen.
I don't think I could watch the film again, and I'm not even sure if I could recommend it to others; and if I did it would only be because I know this is the kind of film that they would like. It's not for everyone, and probably not even for every horror fan, but it is a film worth seeing if you can stand it.
I was originally thinking this would be a film I'd probably give a three out of five. It was good, but I struggled with it, and wasn't sure how to take it. But then I started to think about the film more, and realised that just in talking about those feelings and thoughts I'd written more than two thousand words on it. Surely that means the film has had an impact on me. It might not have been an experience that I loved, or one that I'll ever want to have again, but it's one that's had an effect. And isn't that the real goal of horror, to get under your skin, to make you feel awful? If so, then
Hagazussa has more than done what it's set out to do, and is a film I'm sure I'll think about for a long while to come.
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