To to get into some bog standard folk horror. It’s a pun, you see, because the movie takes place around a bog. I hadn’t heard anything about this movie before I was doing research for the week’s theme but it certainly ticked all the boxes. Rural place. Isolated people. Outsider intruding. Ancient mythology that still has a grip on the locals. Everything you want in a folk horror film.

Somewhere on the edge of a bog in the Netherlands, Betriek lives with her parents and her daughter, Hanna. One day a group of researchers of some kind come to the bog because they found a body that had been dug up by a local town crazy who also died digging out there. As Betriek and the head researcher, Jonas, get to know each other better, the quiet life is destroyed when a member of the research team goes crazy and attacks the family. As the team begins to find more and more bodies in the bog, all killed in the same way, the local legends of a woman that sold her soul for vengeance start to seem like more than just myths.

The movie goes back and forth between being spoken in Dutch and in English, which makes for a fun time with the subtitles. As is so often the case with this genre of horror, it focuses on atmospheric tension and moody set pieces rather than gore and jump scares. The movie is also not worried about immediately giving you an exposition dump of the mythology it’s working with. The name Moloch doesn’t even get mentioned until about two thirds of the way through. I do love the way they handle the mythology, though. I don’t want to get too deep into it since I’m trying to avoid spoilers but the casual way the backstory of the town is told and the way the people reacted to what happened in it is such an interesting way to frame things.

The mystery of what is actually going on and why people are having violent freak outs is so slowly trickled out that you could end up getting bored, especially in the first act. That’s just a problem that feels pretty inherent to the subgenre, though. You have to establish a seemingly boring and quiet rural life first before you can have that reality shattered by the dark truth, after all. The movie adds in some weird stuff about psychic sensitivity about halfway through that feels like it should have probably been either abandoned or developed into something more. Sallie Harmsen, who plays Betriek, does a great job and the movie never gives you that moment where you are screaming at the protagonist for being an idiot. I appreciate that.

This is a movie that couches the way generational trauma is passed down in a story about pagan gods and ghosts. It might not be a great film but it’s certainly one worth watching if that sounds at all interesting to you.

Score: 3.5 out of 5