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A story of loneliness, darkness and suffering with psychedelic overtones; perhaps the result of ancient spirits or maybe a slow descent into delirium, enveloped in a whirlwind of sensations, anguish and paranoia - leaving the viewer to interpret the facts narrated.
Released in 2017, recently featured on Prime, I rushed immediately into viewing this masterpiece - after years and suggestions from fans of the genre.
THE PLOT:
The story takes place in the heart of the Austrian Alps of the fifteenth century, in a village so secluded that it could be placed in any historical context - so is the closed, hostile and immobile nature of some places. Snow-covered peaks and dark valleys frame the story told, the story of Albrun - a peasant girl who lives on the slopes of the mountain.
The film begins by showing us Albrun in her childhood, living with her mother in an isolated cabin in the woods: a simple life of herding and foraging. As often happened in these cases, they are targeted by the local population and are continually subjected to abuse as marginalised women by a strongly patriarchal and Catholic community. The voice that whirls like a whisper, a gust of wind through the trees is always the same: witches.
“Hagazussa”, in fact, means "witch" in High Old German.
More precisely, a nocturnal feminine spirit, liminal between the world of Gods and Men - which came back into fashion as a synonym for "witch" during the Swiss Inquisition, in the fourteenth century.
Are they really witches? Or is it perhaps a sick gossip, the result of an ignorant collective mentality? This is precisely the leitmotif of Hagazussa, leaving us perennially suspended between imagination and reality.
*** ATTENTION - SPOILERS FURTHER DOWN IN THE READING ***
We have the first, significant plot twist when the mother, Martha, unfortunately falls ill with an incurable disease (perhaps plague, seeing the historical period) that slowly devours her - consuming her body but also her psyche, verging on insanity until the last, great act that sees her running in a dressing gown in the middle of the night into the forest; where Albrun will find her deceased the next day.
Thus leaving her young daughter to fend for herself, in a hostile environment.
We then witness an adult Albrun, in the same cabin, while she tends to her goats - the young woman's only source of income - and to her daughter, whose father is not known. As we can imagine, she is still abused for being "the witch's daughter, the madwoman, the single mother who lives in the woods" - until she meets Swinda, a young woman who one day defends her from attacks by village kids.
Albrun, accustomed only to the wickedness and brutality of other human beings, is struck by her kindness and offer of friendship; but unfortunately it is a vain hope: Swinda, like all others, despises Albrun considering her a witch and a pagan - taking advantage of her docility and naivety, to offer her to a man who rapes her with the her aid.
Here something definitively breaks in the protagonist: after years of abuse, she decides to embrace her legacy as a Witch, beginning the descent into her personal darkness among spirits who invoke her name in the dark meanders of the forest, long nights talking with the skull of her mother, placed on a small altar in the house, until we reach the climax with an exasperating psychedelic trip, after having ingested some mushrooms found in the woods.
I will not tell you the most gory, disturbing details, otherwise I would take away the pleasure of viewing this masterpiece, slow and inexorable - like the incessant advance of time.
The almost total lack of dialogue plunges us further into Albrun's life passed in a nearly suffocating solitude, accompanied only by the florid and hostile alpine nature. It gives us the opportunity to passively witness her personal misfortunes, as if we too were part of the village that obsess over her in a morbid way, but without interacting with her disgrace.
The overwhelming silence, interspersed with the gloomy soundtrack, also leaves an open interpretation, possibly giving us two different readings of the whole story.
The first leads us to believe that Albrun is truly a witch, and that she finally decides to embrace her nature by taking revenge for all the violence she suffered. Like almost all European traditional witchcraft stories, it is a story of pain and atonement.
A story that often concerns people who live on the margins of society, who use witchcraft powers to break their chains.
On the other hand and perhaps the most probable interpretation, we have the psychological key: those were other times, being a single and vulnerable woman in medieval Europe meant living a life of violence and risking being accused of witchcraft. Unfortunately, the story of Albrun can be the story of many other women of that era. According to this version, the film drags us into the already fragile mind of a lonely young woman, illiterate and accused of being a heathen for her entire life. With atrocious consequences on her psyche, from the rape (maybe not even the first of her life, as we do not know who the father of her daughter is) to the use of psychotropic substances on an already compromised mind.
Whatever the truth is, in addition to offering us 102 minutes of pure paranoia, this film should make us reflect on this last point: the psychological, as well as physical, repercussions that the witch hunt has caused - and is still causing. If you think witch hunts are a thing of the past, you are wrong.
According to the United Nations, thousands of people are accused of witchcraft, marginalised, killed and tortured every year in more than 50 countries. It occurs mainly in Africa, Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, Latin America and India.
In Saudi Arabia, witchcraft is punished with the death penalty; in Ghana there are the so-called "Witch Camps", where hundreds of women live in relegation after being banished from their communities because they are considered witches; in India, between 1999 and 2013, 2300 murders linked to accusations of witchcraft were recorded. All this led, in July 2021, to the approval by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights of a resolution calling for an end to violence based on accusations of sorcery.
Furthermore, it is not enough to be officially accused of witchcraft to fall into the cruellest misogyny: just look at the recent events in the United States concerning abortion laws. Let us remember that the "witches" were healers, midwives, priestesses; when we talk about witchcraft, we also talk about this: of its intrinsic nature with the sacred feminine, the witch hunt is never over as long as the patriarchy dictates what a person can do or not do with their body and make it illegal, accusing us of sorcery - in some countries, as we have seen, punishable by death.
Every time a woman is silenced, accusing her of being crazy, "hysterical", aggressive, promiscuous, it is a renewed inquisition.
Every story of violence, abuse, gaslighting is the story of each of us, of our inner Albrun.
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