Heresy review – feminist folk horror summons something scary in the woods with supply of fresh blood

A childless woman flees into the forest and emerges with a swollen belly in director Didier Konings’ short, sharp fable Before fertility tourism, the only option for your average medieval serf struggling to conceive was heading to the nearest foreboding woods and summoning weird, antlered dryads.

Or so it seems from Didier Konings’ short but memorable folk-horror debut, in which wide-eyed villager Frieda (Anneke Sluiters) flees into the trees after escaping an attempted rape by local butcher Gelo (Léon van Waas).

He has already told her, after scoffing a pig foetus, that he likes his meat weak and defenceless.

The dryads beat IVF hands down.

Previously chided for her lack of childbearing by husband Hikko (Len Leo Vincent), Frieda emerges with a swollen abdomen.

But the villagers fear it is the devil’s work, especially after finding Gelo in the woods, dismembered but freakishly still conscious.

That’s about the extent of the story here, but Konings pares the focus effectively down to the essentials of this obscurantist hole: the crawling fear of evil among the villagers, and the necessary projection of it on to everything outside their control – female bodies and emotions, the natural world.

Though her character verges on symbolic, Frieda – as well as the “wise women” of the forest, as per the original Dutch title – allow this fable’s feminist credentials to howl out unmistakably.

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