SPECIAL SCREENING Sennentuntschi: Curse Of The Alps

2 Star

Sennentuntschi: Curse Of The Alps was screened at the Film4 FrightFest in August 2011.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is a proverb that plays a prominent role in Michael Steiner’s tongue-twister horror title Sennentuntschi. Having recently had its UK premiere at burgeoning horror festival FrightFest, the mythological elements of this chilling, religious shocker are promoted through titular add-on Curse Of The Alps, which helps to cement the feeling that the supernatural will feature heavily in the drama. In this regard, Sennentuntschi does not disappoint, offering a uniquely deranged brand of melodrama, and a plot that embraces wild abandon.

"This film will test your patience in more ways than one."

Beginning with the grisly discovery of a skeleton on a mountainside, Sennentuntschi flashes back to detail the whos, hows and whys behind the death of this person, and the nature of their presence in a small village in 1975 Switzerland. Keen to ante up the drama early on, this retrospective switch features an immediate introduction of conflict – one of the priests at the local church discovered hung from the bells in an apparent suicide. For the religious inhabitants of this place, a man of the cloth taking his own life bears serious implications, and so the tiny populous seek to discover how this has happened, and to indict the evils behind it.

When a villager spies a mysterious young woman named Sennentuntschi roaming the woods, a search brings her back to the town, where the reluctant agreement is that she is an outsider who has arrived here by chance. After the local Sheriff, Sebastian, fetches her back to the home of the Mayor, Sennentuntschi attacks his pregnant wife in a fit of panic and runs off into the mountains, prompting the villagers to assert that she is a demonic presence in their haven, and to seek out the young woman and bring her to justice…

Since back in the days of Johnny Belinda, muting female protagonists has proved a handy cinematic device for making male exploitation appear even more deplorable. Sennentuntschi exhibits the signs of stunted social development and a lack of emotional maturity (the reason for this is later revealed), appearing as mythical and androgynous a figure as sci-fi badass Summer Glau in Serenity. There’s something dangerous about the way Mesquida stalks this mountainside town, and Steiner promotes her as a form of mythological being, judging all around her with instinctual verve rather than adhere to the ideological framework of this place. Partly through shunning perceived ‘normalities’ of this religiously fanatical paradigm, and partly due to emerging in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sennentuntschi finds herself hunted down, but still treats this town as her natural habitat.

The ‘horror’ in a horror film is often defined by setting: sparse, rural areas provide more mystery and ambiguity towards the nature of the human species. People aren’t seen to be as civilised away from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan life. While not a quintessential horror movie, the wild characters in Sennentuntschi offer few alternatives to insular figures in wilderness-centric mysteries – the primary difference being in their inherent coveting of faith as an answer to harsh, effacing questions about their own way-of-life. These are severely self-absolvent figures, and much of the horror derives from their lack of regard for humanity or human principles.

In mixing spirituality and horror, Sennentuntschi achieves individualist flair.

In mixing spirituality and horror, Sennentuntschi achieves individualist flair – the low-budget frenetic action elements utilised by director Steiner invoking the necessary primal overtones of the script’s treatment of mortality as an unfixed product of lunacy and hearsay. In a society where influence is the largest component of power, there can often be more chiefs than Indians, and the scarier elements of the film are presented through the malevolence of authority figures and outcasts who feel compelled to blame others for their own failures.

Sennentuntschi aptly displays this but certainly doesn’t improve upon countless attempts to explore religious horror, and eventually works some way towards contravening its existing charms as a display of absurdist socio-politics. There’s only so far you can take a story reliant upon manic editing and swathes of fire and brimstone. When Steiner attempts to weave a legitimate Satanist angle into the narrative, he makes the same ham-fisted mistakes evident in mainstream, teen-driven stabs at the genre, losing mystery through presenting ideas that can essentially only have one outcome. He also doesn’t quite follow through on the interrogation of Sennentuntschi, who is consigned to the male gaze as much as Camille Keaton was in 1978′s I Spit On Your Grave – while far less exploitative than that film, Sennentuntschi reveals similarly narrow ideas toward depicting the dangers of being a stranger in a small town.

It feels as if Steiner is attempting to recreate the Italian giallo style of horror popular in the 1960s and 1970s, in which crime was treated more impulsively than logically, and where eroticism met macabre. There are hazardous possibilities available to him, but he often opts for more inherently iconic sequences of destruction and chaos, fragmenting Sennentuntschi to the extent where danger lurks, but in systematically roundabout, routine setups rather than flavoursome and original ones.

Sennentuntschi exhibits many of the flagrant staples of horror with an unabashed desire to entertain – and, for the most part, it does. Nevertheless, the senselessness of the characters render them as vehicles for a grander image of gore and human descent, while the film’s sinister themes remain a limited catalyst for action. For sheer gung-ho revelry, Sennentuntschi is a gutsy, excitable entry into the genre, but requires more attention to detail in order to sidestep the blatant direction of the narrative. There may be scares aplenty but this film will test your patience in more ways than one.