*Sennentuntschi* has almost everything you might reasonably order from the folk-horror cupboard: an Alpine community, an old legend, lonely goatherds, absinthe, a woman apparently conjured from straw and household debris, and the suspicion that something ancient has wandered down from the mountain. The problem is that the film keeps opening the cupboard, throwing in another ingredient and forgetting what it was cooking.
Its central idea is terrific. Three men drunkenly enact the legend of the Sennentuntschi, constructing a woman for their own gratification, only for a real woman to appear. That should leave us wondering whether folklore has become flesh or whether frightened, violent men are simply turning an abused woman into a monster because the story gives them permission to.
Instead, Michael Steiner keeps explaining, complicating and re-complicating. Present day, 1975 and earlier events are folded together with so little visual distinction that disorientation becomes less an unsettling formal strategy than an administrative problem. Even the Alpine landscape struggles to provide the isolation the story needs because the film continually jumps between hut, village, church and investigation without establishing how these places relate to one another.
The soundtrack is similarly restless. Huge, ominous orchestration competes with Serge Gainsbourg and a T. Rex cover as though several different films have wandered into the same edit. There are handsome shots of cloud moving across the mountains, but they often seem to belong to a better-behaved film happening somewhere nearby.
What frustrates most is that *Sennentuntschi* repeatedly brushes against something genuinely disturbing. The sexual violence is horrible, but too often merely horrible, arriving through characters whose behaviour changes faster than the film can make psychological sense of it. Later, a shot briefly positions horns behind the mysterious woman’s head, and suddenly folklore threatens to break properly through the rational surface. The final discovery of the straw-stuffed men has the same grubby, stomach-turning power.
Those moments reveal the film it might have been.
Instead, the folklore gradually becomes a wrapper around a convoluted true-crime story involving buried histories, clerical abuse and explanations delivered after the fact. *Sennentuntschi* wants the old story to remain alive in the Alps, but spends so much time rationalising it that it very nearly kills the thing itself.
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Reviewed by [**FolknHell**](https://www.folknhell.com/), the folk horror film podcast.
Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of [*Sennentuntschi: Curse of the Alps*](https://www.folknhell.com/sennentuntschi-review), along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes, at [**folknhell.com**](http://folknhell.com).
