#A Poetic, But Far Too Derivative Bit Of Folk Horror [Sundance 2022]

Years pass, and the baby, named Nevena, grows into a teenager (played by Sara Klimoska). She’s spent her entire life in that cave, and to say the situation has stunted her development is an understatement. Fitted with hideous, rotten teeth, Klimoska plays the teen Nevena as a feral figure, unable to even walk upright, and almost completely lacking in language skills — she narrates the film with strange, broken words; a kind of cobbled-together language that reminds one of the way Jodie Foster spoke in the film “Nell.” “Me, am I devils?” Nevena asks at one point, and that’s just a small example of the unsophisticated way she uses words. 

Despite being tucked away in a cave for years, Nevena has not been forgotten by Old Maid Maria, and sure enough, the witch comes calling one day, taking the young girl out of the cave and transforming her into something else. She still looks like Nevena, at first. But she now has the ability to transform into other people. This isn’t a simple bit of body-swapping, though. Nevena can seemingly only transform into someone who is dead, and on several occasions, she ends up killing someone before changing into them. The change involves some nasty body horror, with Nevena scooping out bits of flesh and other innards from corpses and smashing them into herself. This, in turn, causes the dead body to seemingly vanish while Nevena takes on their visage. 

After killing new mother Bosilka (Noomi Rapace), Nevena takes on her appearance. The change is noticed immediately by the people of Bosilka’s village – they don’t understand why she’s suddenly acting so strange, so inhuman. This segment of the film has Rapace doing memorable work as she plays a character struggling to be human — she studies other people and fake-laughs when they laugh, bearing too many teeth, looking too unnatural. She swats away people who try to comfort her. She eyes her “husband” with confusion, and he eyes her with disdain. Try as she might, she can never quite get it right.