The Witch (1952)

directed by Roland af Hällström

Finland

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I watched this for Kalevala Day/Finnish Culture Day, which it is not anymore by the time you're reading this, and I'd been searching high and low for it for a long time, because anything that involves someone or something being buried in a bog is an instant watch for me. Some recognize this as Finland's first horror film, but as far as I know that honor belongs to Noidan kirot from 1927, although that one seems to be so scarce as to nearly be a lost film. This movie gets overshadowed by The White Reindeer, another horror film released in the same year, which is also quite good and I recommend it highly as well.

The film begins with a bit of a clash of views between the local farmers on whose land is the bog where the titular witch is "dug up" and the researchers who are searching the bog for archaeological finds. It's a typical situation that comes up in nearly every horror movie involving something being unearthed: The locals know there to be a legend surrounding the area that spawns whatever artifact or entity will later end up plaguing the film, and they wish the city folk would go back to where they came from instead of messing with forces beyond their control. The body of a young woman is uncovered from the bog, and the village's long collective memory immediately recognizes it as substantiating the legend of a witch who was murdered and thrown into the bog 300 years ago. As soon as the body is uncovered, things begin to go awry in the village, but it only gets worse when, in place of the corpse, the very alive body of a nude young woman is found.

There's some severely weird gender politics going on in this film. The arrival of the seemingly undead witch causes every man in town to go a little nuts - not in some primeval, mind-control way (the witch doesn't seem to have that much influence), but she signifies something that frustrates them on a deep level. "All women are witches", they say - in fact they say this over and over, many times. Every man teases his brothers and friends that every woman he's sweet on is a witch. All women are witches. It's posturing to cover up the fact that they're clearly afraid of what the witch represents. She's something they thought they killed, a force they tamped down and then built their identity upon the banishing of. If the witch is back, if the woman we forced into the earth when she tried to defy us is back, who are we as men? The women say that the witch was not really a witch, but a young girl who dared to resist when a local baron demanded a night with her as per tradition; in resisting she became a witch, not for having magic powers but for being the kind of woman who couldn't be suppressed. And the women are solidly afraid of her - they know what the presence of one defiant woman can mean for the rest of them, who will pay the price once the men suspect that they might not have total control over women like they imagined they did.

Mirja Mane plays the witch role with reckless abandon, and she plays it, again, not like a fairytale witch with magic powers, but as a woman who would have been scorned and branded an outcast for her unashamed behavior. She dances naked in the streets, doesn't chain herself to one man, and flaunts her sexuality openly. But when she's first unearthed, she's nothing like this - she's terrified, borderline incoherent; any time anybody suggests she might be the 300-year-old witch come back from the dead, she physically reacts as if someone slapped her. It's only with time that she becomes the impish, cackling, free-willed terror running roughshod over the town's rigid menfolk.

There is some ambiguity that the film seems to be pushing about whether or not she's actually the witch of legend, and this is the only thing I disliked about it. The ending felt weak and too soft for a film as bold as this one. Spoilers for a 70-year-old film: She basically comes to her senses and realizes that she was just a normal girl who - silly old me! - tripped and fell into the bog hole, never mind that we literally see her do things like disappear into thin air and that nobody acknowledges whether or not the unearthed skeleton was just laying there beneath her the whole time, as it would have been had she really just fell into the bog. I guess the point was that she became whatever the people of the town were afraid of her becoming, that at first she was a blank slate with no opinion of herself, but once people started to fear her, she became what they feared and worse. In the end, as is so often the case, the single person who is the object of an entire community's fear isn't the villain - the community is.

The Witch has a kind of dynamic energy that fits it as one of only a few horror movies coming from a country whose film industry was still relatively young. It doesn't feel stiff or restrained the way so many '50s horror films from the West do. The characters are not afraid to speak their minds and be loud and authentic - not rude, but with the shackles of performativity removed. I'm thinking of the woman, who's only in one scene, that they bring in because they get the idea that maybe the bog witch is this lady's daughter. She takes one look at her and basically goes "Nope, she's not mine, you think I don't know the people I've made?" and then demands compensation for being made to walk a long way on her elderly, aching legs. She's not treated as the butt of a joke, as some caricature of a tough old broad, she's just there for her one scene and exists as something outside the bounds of gender roles, much like the witch herself. Even though it tapers down to a somewhat disappointing ending, this movie is a joy to watch. As an aside, it seems to me like a lot of Finns have a very negative opinion of their country's film industry - I'd like to know what, if any, modern Finnish movies are generally well-regarded among the public.