Moloch (2022)

An effective but uneven folk horror from the Netherlands, a place not generally associated with unspeakable ancient evil steeped into the soil ... but is the real monster the atrocious dubbing?

Sorry to bother you.  We're here to talk about the terrible ancient curse afflicting your bloodline.  Can we com in?

Moloch is a mixed bag.  First of all, the dubbing is terrible.  Characters speak without moving their lips and then their lips flap for several seconds after the finish their lines - which are rendered in unemphatic fashion by voice actors who sound bored rather than terrified or annoyed or aroused.  Why, couldn't they have stuck subtitles on?  The set of people who are willing to soldier on in spite of the dire dubbing is identical to the set of people who will read subtitles.  Why degrade their experience by this travesty?

But that said ...

Beneath this superficial issue is a good film, made in a very small way and with a tight, claustrophobic atmosphere, set in a stark landscape of trees, mist and bog.  Sallie Harmsen plays Betriek a woman whose family's link to the land, and the horror that imbrues it, are deeper and darker than she can possibly understand.

She just wants a normal, hapless life, but her batty mother, paranoid father and an ancient legend invoking Moloch, the demonic murderer of children make it unlikely she can expect much satisfaction in that regard.  They all live together in a grimly historied house on the edge of a small, benighted town in a swamp, where ancient corpses keep popping out of the ground and where children perform deeply weird ritualistic pageants as part of the school show ... I am not familiar with the educational curriculum in the Netherlands but I am fairly sure what was enacted was not approved by the central authorities.

You think your parents are bad?  Meet mine!  I should have moved out as soon as I turned 18 and never come home.

We watch Betriek go about her humdrum life.  A recent widow, she lives with her parents, has a daughter, and is developing a crush on the nice Danish archaeologist chap whose team are digging up corpses of women in the bog - all women, and all with their throats slashed in a peculiar way.  In spite of her very understandable urge towards obscure mediocrity, she can't ignore the atmosphere of menace that enfolds her and her daughter.  Perhaps the fellow who bursts into her house and tries to stab mummy in the mouth is just a bit unhinged ... Surely nothing to do with the old legends that haunt the bleakly uninviting swamp scape about pacts with demons.  But the strangeness and ominosities keep piling up, and all seemingly somehow connected to those bog bodies and the semi-repressed memories of a terrible night in Betriek's childhood ...

The tone and pacing of the film are deliberate and restrained.  Though there are stark scenes of horror and disruption they are - appropriately - jolting interruptions of quiet lives.  There are a couple of well executed home invasion sequences and - finally, after the duds in Revealer and Blood Vessel - a brief but suitably unsettling demonic manifestation.

We are a little bit concerned about your daughter's art project ...

The film is uneven - slow moving in places, and Betriek seems to switch unpredictably between trying to unravel the dark mystery buried deep in the bogs and ancient folk history, and her developing romance with Jonas, the likeable archeologist.  But in a strange way that seems realistic - we compartmentalise our lives.  After all, if we can maintain a little bit of near normalcy amid the engulfing chaos, perhaps we can ultimately push the waves back before they overwhelm us ... 

But where the film works, it works very well - in a low key way that is more effective than a jump-scare laden scream fest.  The atmosphere of doom that hangs over the town and the house and Betriek is almost palpable, as substantial as the fog that shrouds the woods.

It builds to a satisfyingly dark and bleak conclusion.  It won't win admirers from people who think the quality of a horror film is only measured in 'inventive kills' or gore being splattered across the screen.  It is a measured horror, showing the smallness and ineffectiveness of humans in the face of incomprehensibly old evil.  All  Betriek's efforts come to naught and her doom is sealed because she just can't understand what she is dealing with - no crazed intruder, or malevolent spirit but an evil more ineffable than a rational human can bend their mind around.  And it what makes it - for all its terrible dubbing and uneven tempo - an interesting and unsettling horror film.

Star Rating: **