In a remote French village, a Polish family has integrated into such community as there is – perhaps because their brutal misogyny isn’t that much different from the prevailing norms. Nawojka (Maria Wrobel), a young woman, has to cook and do household chores for her father Henryk (Wilciech Skibinski), who hobbles on a crutch, and her bullying, dismissive brothers Tomek (Przemyslaw Przestrzelski) and Bogdan (Kubya Dyniewicz). She says she’d like to go to veterinarian school – her brothers react with astonished contempt and her father shame-facedly says they’ll talk about it later meaning never. Obviously, the men in the family don’t want to lose an unpaid skivvy – though she still gets called ‘shit-brains’ by Tomek, who nevertheless expects his dinner on the table. The issue is clouded by Naw’s belief that she has inherited a certain witchiness from her late mother, who evidently self-destructed (possibly in a way which incidentally crippled Henryk). At nights, Naw contorts as if possessed and is overcome by dangerous urges.
Into this volatile situation comes Sandra (Roxane Mesquida), with pink-tinged hair, a miniskirt and leg-brace – ostracised by the locals and only here to sell off the family farm before getting the hell out again. Naw is drawn to take-no-shit Sandra, who also has a contested backstory which has turned everyone in the village – including her own relatives – against her. A mystery disease begins to afflict the cattle, with a strange mucus/fungus discharge pooling in the fields. Director Julia Kowalski, who also co-wrote with Simon Beufils, conjures up a world rather like a French version of the community in Nigel Kneale’s TV play Murrain – where everyone rallies against female outsiders, but day-to-day behaviour is awful enough without the supernatural laid in. Even a Polish wedding, with Tomek getting hitched to Alice (Eva Lallier Juan), spirals into drunken, dangerous foolishness with Naw and Sandra making a bad decision to go for a ride into the woods with the local vet (Jean-Baptiste Durand) and butcher (Raphael Thiery) who are plainly out to shoot, rape or batter either of them or a passing deer. This scene doesn’t turn out the way anyone expected, and the fallout is startling – with a hint that Naw’s mucus voodoo actually works on the accursed, though of course the locals decide to persecute the wrong witch.
Wrobel gives an intensely physical performance, transforming her look over the course of the film – and eventually drags the picture out of the grim rural realism category into folk horror. Like Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga, the timeframe could almost be any year in the last half-century – only the makes of cars and the blaring music at the wedding are pointers to when this is actually taking place, since the underlying suspicion is that round here things will never change unless the whole place is blighted and burned to rot and ashes, which is a distinct possibility. It’s not free of the folk horror convention that everyone who lives outside the nicer parts of cities is an ignorant savage, though we get a range of character types and a sense of the complicated webs of aggression and dependency which binds this community together. The overbearing Tomek and more timid, watchful Bogdan aren’t the same kind of bastard but as it turns out they’re both bastards – and the younger brother’s need to fit in will paradoxically take him too far in the grimly downbeat climax.
Opens in the US today.