The variety of horror ingredients gives the ghost world in Moloch an impressive relief ★★★★☆

The horrific death of her grandmother, decades ago, still reverberates in the mind of music teacher Betriek. The Dutch horror film Moloch opens with a sinister flashback, in which Betriek plays in the cellar as a child and hears strangers climbing the stairs. Screaming in Grandma’s bedroom, right above her head. Blood splashing from the ceiling onto Betrik’s face. And then that rhythmic thump: Grandma’s last convulsions, which flow smoothly into the beat of the piece that the grown-up Betriek is composing in a hotel room.

Not wrong, how director Nico van den Brink saw the first horror moment of Moloch subtly immersed in psychology. And how he and screenwriter Daan Bakker intertwine past and present. Widow Betriek (a fine, natural role by Sallie Harmsen) lives again in the same Drenthe house on the peat forest in her thirties, together with her daughter and her parents (Anneke Blok and Fred Goessens). You can tell from the moody setting that the macabre family history will play out. Strange whispers come from the misty bogs. Gradually, the house loses its warmth and clarity, only to be swallowed up by darkness and greenish moonlight.

Aggressive, as if demon-possessed visits from complete strangers, that too awaits Betriek and her family, in excellently constructed scenes that take advantage of the sympathetic characters and the strong acting. You don’t want anything to happen to these people, and that’s what makes such a long knife hanging over someone’s mouth opening effective and intense. The solid electronic soundtrack by Ella van der Woude also contributes Moloch Add to the tension, just like the cinematography of cameraman Emo Weemhoff, which revolves around zooms and terribly long takes.

The pleasantly dosed consternation seems to have to do with the apparently accidental discovery of a particularly intact bog corpse not far from Betriek’s mother’s house. The find puts Betriek in the path of the sympathetic Danish archaeologist (Alexandre Willaume) and makes her think a lot. Maybe she’s cursed. Or maybe in the end everything points to the locally idolized witch Feike, who died a terrible martyr’s death but has since been revered as a bringer of fertility and prosperity. With this invented folk saga, Van den Brink and Bakker give a successful local twist to the popular subgenre folk horror†

There are many different ingredients in a film that also aims to thematize intergenerational trauma and repeatedly evokes the existential fear that your loved ones are not who they say they are. Apart from a slightly sagging third act, Van den Brink keeps his first full-length film firmly in the saddle. And if some scenes are not completely convincing (the eerie child and the ghost in the hospital elevator), others (the figure slowly emerging from the morning mist at the peat grave) do so.

What a great find too, to unravel the myth surrounding Feike through a bizarre school musical. so put Moloch You are repeatedly wrong-footed and the ghost world around the peat takes on an impressive relief – right down to ominous sugar packets.