With a wave of her staff, the wind begins to sway, And trees lean in, to hear her incantations say. The creatures of the forest, gather 'round her feet, Entranced by her wisdom, and the secrets she'll repeat.
Hagazussa is not entertainment. It is an experience. If you watch it for "scary monsters" or "jump scares," you will be bored to tears. You should watch Hagazussa if:
At its core, Hagazussa is a scathing critique of the patriarchal society of the late Middle Ages. Albrun is persecuted not for any actual crime, but for the simple fact of her "otherness"—her solitude, her poverty, and her defiance of social norms. The villagers project their fears of plague, pagans, and outsiders onto her, making her a convenient scapegoat.
The controversy centers on Chapter Three: the infanticide. Unlike Hereditary (which uses a child’s death as a plot engine), Hagazussa forces you to watch Albrun methodically, slowly, and lovingly place her baby on a stone and cover it with a woven basket. The camera does not cut away. We hear the child’s muffled cries fade. For some viewers, this is an unforgivable act of narrative cruelty. For others, it is the logical endpoint of a woman who has been dehumanized so thoroughly that her maternal instinct has twisted into murderous paranoia (she believes the baby is a changeling—a demon replacement). Hagazussa
Hagazussa belongs to a distinct cinematic category often debated by critics as the "post-horror" or "elevated horror" wave . These films substitute conventional monsters for internal trauma, grief, and the terrors of existential dread. By engaging deeply with the historical definition of the word, Feigelfeld's work challenges the audience to question where the true evil resides: in the ancient, unmapped magic of the woods, or within the cruel, structured confines of human society.
Yes, —but with a clear warning label. It's a film that excels at what it sets out to do: create a folk horror tone poem about isolation, superstition, and a woman's unraveling. If you have patience for its deliberate rhythm and stomach for its grim subject matter, you'll find it a memorable, powerful, and unsettling piece of work. If you need a traditional story with a fast pace, look elsewhere.
Swinda brings a clay pot of butter. “For the cough, dear.” Albrun knows rancor when she smells it, but she is starving for kindness. She spreads the butter on black bread. Within hours, her belly seizes. She vomits blood into a bucket. The goats circle her, bleating. That night, feverish, she sees her mother standing in the goat pen, water dripping from her ears. “They don’t burn what they fear,” her mother’s corpse-mouth says. “They poison it. Slow. Then call it God’s will.” With a wave of her staff, the wind
The Hagazussa is a liminal figure, neither fully part of society nor entirely lost to the wilderness.
Hagazussa is a singular, uncompromising film — austere, immersive, and quietly devastating. It transforms the witch myth into an embodied study of loneliness and cultural cruelty, using landscape, sound, and performance to unsettle rather than to explain. For audiences willing to be patient and to surrender to mood over exposition, it offers an intense, lingering experience that lingers long after the credits roll.
However, Hagazussa is a far more radical and less forgiving work. Where The Witch has a conventional plot and character development, Hagazussa is a series of impressionistic, horrifying vignettes. With barely 50 lines of dialogue, it is an almost wordless exercise in dread, whereas The Witch uses its period-accurate language to build its world. Ultimately, if The Witch is a slow-burn folk tale, Hagazussa is a hypnotic, nightmarish tone poem that actively rejects narrative comfort in favor of pure, unadulterated atmosphere. It is an experience
Hagazussa is a "meditative nightmare." It is a film about the terror of being alone and the cruelty of human prejudice.
In 2017, Austrian filmmaker Lukas Feigelfeld revived the ancient term for his striking folk horror film, Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse . Rather than relying on Hollywood jump-scares, the film treats the word as a psychological and historical diagnostic tool. It strips away centuries of cinematic witch clichés to examine how a hostile, deeply religious community actively constructs its own monsters. Plot and Character Arc
Hagazussa is frequently compared to Robert Eggers' The Witch , but it leans even further into avant-garde, impressionistic filmmaking.
At its core, Hagazussa is less about supernatural monsters and more about the monstrous nature of human cruelty and mass hysteria. 1. The Etymology of "Hagazussa"