Moloch
It was in 1991 that Betriek’s grandmother was murdered upstairs in her bedroom while Betriek played directly below, covering her ears when she heard the screams; thirty years later, her own daughter Hanna is about the same age she was then, still living in the same house with her father who took to drink after the incident and her mother who retreated into herself, never the same again, suffering from fits which the doctor’s suggest are due to the unresolved trauma.
An isolated house in the northern Netherlands near a field of peat bogs, they are tied to the myth of Feike who made a pact with the god Moloch and thwarted those who accused her of witchcraft, the story celebrated in an annual pageant in which Hanna is to take the lead role and for which Betriek is composing the score, but with archaeologist Jonas’ team recovering a preserved body it seems the bog may have another truth to tell.
The mist as thick as the forest surrounding the ancient peat bog, director Nico van den Brink’s Moloch is as first equally impenetrable, slow moving as incidents occur with no apparent connection other than their proximity to the bog, the death of a local eccentric known apparently from hypothermia, Betriek and her family seeing intruders on their property at night, presumably researchers from the dig.
The script by Daan Bakker and van den Brink smouldering for the longest time before it ignites, it allows time for the relationship between Betriek and Jonas (Blade Runner 2049‘s Sallie Harmsen and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets‘ Alexandre Willaume) to develop naturally, she convinced that there is a curse on her family, a belief compounded when a worker breaks into her house at night and attacks her mother, Jonas unable to explain the change in the personality of a man he has known for years.
Presented for the most part as a dark drama of the difficult lives of those scarred by a past they have no control over and fighting against a fate cloaked in layers of mud and mystery, the omnipresent shadow of the supernatural coalesces as Moloch progresses and the dig uncovers more bodies, each of them killed the same way but over a period of hundreds of years.
The Feike pageant a procession of fireworks and masked celebrants bearing a litter on which stands a straw effigy of the horned god, Moloch presents folk horror in a modern domestic setting, all the more unsettling for the believable performances set against the whispering of the bog and the screams of the wronged women whose spirits haunt the forest.
Moloch will be available on Shudder from Thursday 21st July
