Hagasuzza

An old witch in a small town in olden-days germany.  Reminiscent of "The VVitch," which I remember being good but need to rewatch, Hagasuzza (Gesundheit!) is really.... something else. While technically in german (high german even, so less understandable somehow), there is so little dialog that I recommend watching without subtitles, which get in the way since there are more [footsteps] and [wind noises] annotations than actual translations.  The technical aspects of the film are well-done: sounds, cinematography, direction.  The pacing however, was extremely slow even for me, and I love a good a slow burn. The movie is broken into 4 chapters, which get increasingly faster paced (ending with a final chapter that is only "slow" instead of "extremely slow") as well as increasingly weird.  And by weird, I mean "German Weird." 

I liked the opening chapter, "SHADOWS."  It was cold.  It was spooky.  It was slow, but there were witches.  I appreciated a lot of the shots here and in the second chapter, "HORN."  The mood was done well, and the attention to detail by the production team was great.  The plot (or lack thereof) started to really struggle here, though, when there was a pretty bad (although thankfully not graphic) rape scene. .  I was actually engaged here because I was rooting for the witch to go postal on the village, and she did, but in a very weird (like.....menstrual blood and rats weird) way.  hrm?

The final 2 chapters, "BLOOD" and "FIRE" just got weird.  Baby weird. Bloody weird. Trippy weird. German Weird. After some *serious* witching down in a creepy bog we end up with the thrilling conclusion, by which I mostly mean I was thrilled it was ending.  

Overall, it's a C, which I think is generous but as I said I like the slow ones, and I can tolerate attempts at "doing a art" even if they miss the mark.  This movie reminds me of one of my favorite subreddits: r/ATBGE which stands for Awful Taste but Great Execution.  Go check it out and you'll see that Hagasuzza would fit right in.