Mother Superior
Once a grand building which dominated the landscape, Rosenkreuz Manor in Semmering in Lower Austria has now fallen into sad disrepair, dark and damp with paint peeling, a downfall matched by occupant Baroness Helene von Heidenreich, once a formidable woman of high standing now suffering from Parkinson’s disease who has burned through a revolving door of nurses with her temper and demands.
Determined to succeed is newly qualified Sigrun, though not for the benefit of the Baroness so much as her own interests, investigating those behind the Lebensborn programme of the Third Reich which awarded those deemed to be of pure blood for producing a generation of Aryan children who would be raised by the state, Sigrun an orphan born in 1944 whose documents were lost in the war and quite possibly a product of Lebensborn herself.
Set in the year 1975, Mother Superior (Mater Superior) is the debut feature of writer and director Marie Alice Wolfszahn, making its UK premiere as part of the FrightFest strand of the Glasgow Film Festival and starring Isabella Händler as Sigrun, Inge Maux as Baroness Heidenreich, Jochen Nickel as groundskeeper Otto Hanussen, devoted to his mistress, and Tim Werths as Sigrun’s sole ally, Wilfried Grünwald.
Told in flashback through a police interview with Sigrun, named for the leader of the Valkyrie, she had been warned to stay out of the unoccupied wings of the house but inevitably investigated, uncovering files and folders of documents and photographs but with anything referring to her own birth and parentage conspicuously absent, information which will only be forthcoming if the Baroness deems her worthy.
The initially frosty relationship between Sigrun and Baroness Helene warming in the strange circumstances, sharing apple pie and secrets on the snowy lawn, it is apparent that eugenics was not her only interest, with evidence of experiments in electricity which leave characteristic burns on skin, a pattern reflected in the way a drop of Sigrun’s blood spreads across a blotting pad, as well as mysticism, the Baroness and Otto both part of the occult sect the Templars of the Blood Moon.
Understated in the reserved performances and the isolated and decaying environment in which it is played out, Mother Superior, sometimes appended with Dweller of the Threshold, is elegant in its artistry, the Baroness jealously hoarding her knowledge and power even as she fades, more slowly but no less unavoidably than the cruel order to which she devoted herself, a mixture of science fiction and horror presented through a lens of realism as befits a film which presents itself in the style of the German cinema of the period in which it is set.
The Glasgow Film Festival has now concluded
