Madre Superiora

Mother Superior: A Folk Horror film set in Austria in 1975. Sigrun goes to a remote mansion to nurse the ailing Baroness Heidenreich. Sigrun has ulterior motives she knows that the Baroness ran one of the SS Lebensborn Homes where Sigrun was born in 1944, Hoping to find out who her mother was , she searches through hidden archives. There's more going on in the house though, she finds the Baroness and her strange servant Otto performing Pagan Rituals. There are magazines and news clippings scattered around which point to Heidenreich's long involvement with German folk circles in particular a cult which worshiped the Moon Goddess and opposed Patriarchy. The Baroness was attempting to run a very strange breeding programme during the Nazi era. There is an eerie, ethereal feel to the film from the outset, Sigrun has dreams and visions of the Goddess and Occult activities in the manor. She undergoes preparations for a ritual, indeed the ritual may have been going on since she first arrived. The narrative unfolds through "found footage" where Sigrun is interrogated by two police officers, through flashbacks we learn of about what occurred. For once this is a film which would have benefited from additional running as at 71 minutes the ending feels a bit rushed though satisfying from a Folk horror perspective. Directed & Written by Marie Alice Wolfszahn. 8/10.

Recapping her experiences to a police investigation, a woman retells of her recent job as a nurse for a strict woman as a means of exploring the truth about her birth mother that she's never known, but the longer she stays there she comes to learn of the true reason for the visit to the house.

This was a pretty decent if somewhat problematic effort. When this one scores the best is due to the highly impressive and enjoyable Gothic genre tropes that are employed here due to the fantastic setting that enhances an overall engrossing mystery. With the rustic, rural manner taking centerstage here and a fantastic setpiece showing the occult manners that take place here, it serves this one well enough to introduce the fantastic mystery at the heart of the film with this one mainly focusing on her search for her mother that ties itself into the shared backstory they have. It leads to a smattering of fantastic and gruesome imagery here through the ritualistic practices employed here once the mystery comes to a head as this one becomes more focused on switching over to the witchcraft angle at the heart of the film in the back half of the running time. However, that factor also exposes the one main drawback here as the film tends to pull off the mysticism and witchcraft angles out of the blue to justify the genre tag it ends up generating. The first half doesn't even offer anything in the way of genuine thrills or excitement for what it does, even with the interrupting flashbacks to the police interrogation that's running everything together, as the film instead focuses on the nursing duties for her cover and getting to know the main cast around her. This setup, in addition to the overall brevity of the piece barely running over an hour, causes the majority of the occult leanings to feel shoehorned into the point of barely registering their purpose or impact on everything, especially with the rushed and confused end that doesn't explain anything which holds this back.

Rated Unrated/R: Violence and Language.