The opening scenes of Mother Superior (2022) do a couple of things: not only do they establish the film’s esoteric subject matter via the newspaper clippings, photos, art and symbols shown to us, but they also forge links to a German horror tradition which has, in effect, shaped horror cinema itself since its inception a century ago. Take away the colour (and the quick segue into a sequence showing us 70s-era analogue tech) and this feels like a clear and recognisable nod to early horror cinema; it captures something specific from the early-to-mid 20th Century which contextualises our story. As such, the film sets out its stall as an occult horror period piece, but it also has enough modern tricks and a sense of the cinema which has appeared in the interim between then and now to distinguish itself.
We get to the story itself via different forms of media; after the clippings, we next witness a police interview. A young woman, Sigrun (Isabella Händler) is having her interview recorded. Yes, this pushes the technological likelihood to breaking point given the 1975 setting is made abundantly clear, but it does allow an engaging narrative framework to come into being. Sigrun explains the events of recent months: she details a recent job she took at a dilapidated manor house called Rosenkreutz Manor. (Rosenkreutz – now, if ever there was a significant German name, that’s one.) Sigrun took a job there as a nurse, assisting the elderly Baroness Heidenreich (again with the symbolic names) who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. We then switch perspectives, arriving at the pile alongside Sigrun, and thereafter, by and large, seeing the story unfold in a more conventional way.
The Baroness is exacting, with a long list of house rules and requirements, including an edict that Sigrun must stay out of the abandoned wings of the house – for safety, of course. Groundskeeper Otto (Jochen Nickel) helps to enforce all of these rules, apparently regarding the young nurse with suspicion. But, slowly, relationships begin to build, and the Baroness reveals that she herself was involved in medicine once. It transpires that she means her past role as head of a Lebensborn (‘spring of life’) hospital during the War, an SS project to both support and, to an extent, enable Aryan births. This is of particular interest to Sigrun: she never knew her own parents, having been born in a Lebensborn unit herself.
Her interest and investment are piqued enough to lead her to begin searching the old house for information, particularly on the identity of her mother. This, it seems, was always her goal in going to the house, though there are no sudden or easy answers for her. The weeks and months pass, and there’s more: whatever the Baroness’s old interests in the occult, it seems that they are not over, and much about the house corroborates this. Sigurd becomes increasingly drawn into the house, the household and what it potentially has to offer to her: this leads her to leave behind her old life, which was, after all, an alienated kind of existence, if a conventional one: ideas of destiny, belonging and magic begin to swirl.
There’s such a wide-ranging blend of horror elements and influences brought to bear on this economical, rather beautiful and purposeful film (albeit that it means things are rounded up quite abruptly; the film is a mere 1 hour, 11 minutes long, after all). Aside from the crumbling, remote house, the mysterious characters and the tantalising allusions to magic, there’s an even more interesting aspect; the solid horror tradition of younger women taking care of older, ailing women. Dolores Claiborne (1995) and Saint Maud (2019) spring to mind; there are of course many more. This motif is so interesting because the power balance is never straightforward; youth and beauty can be derailed by money, knowledge or power, and you can never suppose that an older or an infirm person is ever a spent force; they usually retain some peculiar means.
The story thereafter opens up to take on a fantastical direction, one which feels very familiar in some ways, but it’s bold enough to explore the historical Nazi preoccupation with völkisch magic – though it also departs quite radically from this, too. There may be some viewers who find these links unpalatable in any case; it would be a mistake to dismiss the film on these grounds, however, even though the film also humanises Baroness Heidenreich, with Inge Maux getting her performance tonally just right. It’s worth remembering that cinema has long utilised, explored and disrupted aspects of Nazi lore in a range of genres, from stony drama to lurid exploitation. Mother Superior is neither of these, though it is heady in some respects, surprisingly compassionate in others: beyond this it is also a fairly familiar-seeming search for belonging, with folk horror vibes which just happen to be quasi-Germanic – with some perhaps surprising feminist messaging, too, before we’re done.
Mother Superior will screen on 14th October at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. For more details on the fest, please click here.