Heresy review

By Simon Thompson

Director Didier Konings and writer Marc S.Nollkaemper’s Heresy is a blandly predictable folk-horror that trundles along to its conclusion. Hersey hits all of the folk-horror beats with such monotonous regularity that viewing it feels like Konings and Nollkaemper were being relentlessly tailed by the horror film equivalent of a site inspector with a clipboard, making sure that all of their cliches were up to code and on time. 

Set in a medieval Dutch village, Hersey follows Frieda (Anneke Sluiters, who bears an almost uncanny resemblance to Claire Fisher from Six Feet Under), a young woman struggling to become pregnant who is shunned by both her husband and her community at large for being unable to conceive. While out one day she fends off a violent advance from the village butcher, escaping into the nearby dense forest. Frieda manages to come back out of the forest in one piece, which only further exacerbates the religiously fanatical village’s suspicions of her.

Luuk De Kok’s cinematography is beautifully arranged. Shot on location in The Netherlands (Haps to be specific), De Kok’s dark colour palette and lighting give the village location a strong dark fantasy aspect in keeping with the movie’s overall tone, informed by the combination of dark fantasy and grittily realistic depiction of medieval Europe reminiscent of both Robert Eggers’s The Witch as well as classic European fantasy/historical comic books such as Thorgal and The Towers Of Bois Maury. 

Anneke Sluiters gives a commanding and empathetic performance as Frieda, to the extent that her acting outshines the rest of the cast’s. Sluiters is blessed with a terrifically expressive face, which Konings fully capitalises on through extensive close ups.

Overall, as good as Sluiters’s central performance and the cinematography are, they are let down by the crushing predictability of Nollkaemper’s script, which recycles every tired folk horror trope in the deck. The knock-on effect of this is that all jeopardy is removed because you know exactly what is going to happen, neutralising any suspense, which in a genre that is at its best through employing misdirection is the  kiss of death.