I was viscerally spellbound – hairs on end, eyes wide, mouth agog – by Macedonian-Australian writer/director Goran Stolevski’s feature film debut: a shockingly great horror movie that cleverly differentiates itself from umpteen other productions involving witches and forests visited by the damned. Yet, part of me also wanted to put on my sports shoes and run for the hills, to obtain as much distance as possible between myself and the screen, in the hope that the awful energy leaking from it would stop coursing through my system.
In narrative beats, the film – an Australian, UK and Serbian co-production – resembles a dark fairytale or folklore, crafted with the air of an uncompromising artist refusing to bow to outside pressures. Set in and around a Macedonian village in the 19th century, its best-known actor is Noomi Rapace (most famous as goth hacker Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) but there’s no lead star, on account of the protagonist being a shapeshifting entity assuming various bodies.
