“Heresy” is a compact but ferocious film about a woman cast out as a sinner, who finds salvation in the very darkness her oppressors fear.
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MORBID MINI: Equal parts bleak and beautiful, Heresy is a lean feminist horror story where trauma, folklore, and fury collide in the mist.
In my humble opinion, there are few horror subgenres more satisfying than folk horror when it is done right.
At its best, folk horror doesn’t just give us creepy woods and whispered legends. It digs into the old rot beneath civilized society. It asks who gets to define sin, who gets punished for it, and what happens when the monsters in the forest start looking a lot less frightening than the people in power.
Didier Konings’ Heresy, originally titled Witte Wieven, understands that equation beautifully.
After a successful festival run that included stops at Fantastic Fest and Sitges, the Dutch folk horror film has made its way to Shudder, where it is poised to become one of those international discoveries genre fans start urgently recommending to each other.
It will almost certainly draw comparisons to Robert Eggers’ The Witch, and that comparison is not entirely unfair. Both films are steeped in religious terror, feminine repression, and the seductive pull of the forbidden woods. But Heresy is not merely a Dutch riff on Robert Eggers’ puritan nightmare. It has its own folklore, its own furious heartbeat, and a much meaner monster-movie streak.
Set in a rigid Dutch village ruled by superstition, fear, and religious control, Heresy follows Frieda, played with devastating force by Anneke Sluiters.
Frieda is not simply unhappy. She is trapped in a community that has reduced her entire existence to one cruel biological expectation.
Because she cannot conceive, she is treated as defective, shameful, and suspect. In this world, a woman’s body is not her own. It belongs to her husband, her church, her village, and whatever god the men in charge invoke when they need a prettier name for control.
That is what makes Heresy such a potent piece of feminist horror.
The film understands that the terror is not only in what might be lurking in the mist. It is in the casual brutality of a society that turns misogyny into a doctrine. Frieda’s suffering is not framed as an isolated cruelty. It is a system. Her pain is communal property. Her inability to perform womanhood in the narrow way demanded of her becomes evidence of moral failure.
She is blamed, pitied, punished, and eventually hunted by people who have convinced themselves that faith gives them permission to be monstrous.
It is oppressive, and intentionally so.
Like The Devil’s Bath, another bleak period horror film about misogyny and the unbearable weight placed on women’s bodies, Heresy is not an easy watch. It is grim in a way that feels unpleasantly relevant.
The film may be set in a distant past, but the questions it raises do not feel ancient. Who gets believed? Who gets blamed? How often has a woman’s body been turned into a battleground for male fear, ego, and spiritual panic?
Konings builds that horror with remarkable confidence, especially considering the film’s limited scale.
His background as a concept artist shows in the way every frame feels designed without feeling overdesigned. The world of Heresy is muted, damp, and suffocating.The atmosphere is spellbinding.
It is claustrophobic without feeling visually monotonous, grim without becoming lifeless. The dim lighting and desaturated palette give the film a painterly quality, but Konings never lets the beauty soften the brutality. This is a gorgeous film about an ugly world.
The sound design deserves special praise. So much of the fear in Heresy comes from what we hear before we understand what we are seeing. The woods breathe. The mist seems alive. The elegant restraint feels controlled and purposeful, not a budgetary necessity.
The film knows exactly when to withhold and when to reveal.
And when it does reveal, Heresy delivers far more than just mood.
Eventually, the film stops merely whispering about the old magic in the woods and lets the horror become beautifully, grotesquely tangible. The creature work is startlingly strong, with designs that feel mythic, mournful, and genuinely unsettling. There is an earthy, tragic beauty to them that calls to mind Guillermo del Toro’s love of monsters as wounded, sacred things.
But Heresy is not content to make its horrors elegant. It also lets them be wet, violent, and punishing.
For much of its lean runtime, we are forced to sit with Frieda’s degradation. We watch her endure the crushing weight of a world that sees her as less than human. When the forbidden woods finally offer something other than death, the film transforms with her.
What begins as a story of persecution becomes something closer to vengeance, rebirth, and dark liberation.
Sluiters is the anchor that makes all of this work.
Her performance is physical, wounded, and magnetic. Watching Frieda evolve from broken victim to a force of nature is enormously satisfying because her transformation feels frightening and earned. The film lets her become something dangerous, and it dares us to ask whether danger might be exactly what a world like this deserves.
At just over an hour, Heresy is refreshingly lean.
There is no needless mythology dump or overexplained lore to dull the mystery. Konings trusts the audience to understand the emotional and symbolic stakes without underlining or highlighting everything.
This will not be for everyone, especially if you are looking for escapist popcorn horror or are allergic to horror with overt social commentary. But for viewers who love folk horror that is moody, mythic, feminist, and fierce, this is a Dutch delight worth seeking out.
It is beautiful and brutal, and itunderstands one of horror’s most enduring truths: sometimes the monster in the woods is not the thing we should be afraid of.
Sometimes, she is the thing we have been waiting for.
Overall Rating (Out of 5 Butterflies): 4
