Laurin

Laurin was made in 1989, although somebody appears to have forgotten to tell the film. With its saturated reds, misty rural interiors and faces arranged as though Hammer Horror had only just shut up shop for the evening, Robert Sigl’s film looks several decades older. That is not merely decorative nostalgia. Its slightly unreal appearance helps turn an appallingly grim story into something closer to a corrupted fairy tale.

Laurin is a young girl living in an isolated German village where boys disappear and the adults prove remarkably poor at joining the dots. She sees the missing children, experiences visions of her dead mother and gradually understands more about the returning schoolmaster than anybody around her. Yet the film rarely treats those supernatural intrusions as shocks. They simply belong to Laurin’s world, where the border between memory, imagination and haunting has become agreeably porous.

One peculiar detail helps unlock it. Laurin initially sleeps in a cot-like bed surrounded by bars, absurdly over-protective for a nine-year-old. But protection becomes a recurring idea. The dead children guide her. Her mother seems to return at moments of danger. Even when Laurin enters the killer’s territory, the film never quite makes her feel abandoned. The supernatural may therefore be less a source of horror than a defensive system built around a child whom the living adults have failed. That reading is not watertight, but Laurin is more interesting when allowed to remain slightly slippery.

Its villain receives the opposite visual treatment. The schoolmaster is increasingly photographed as a grotesque, almost storybook ghoul, while the straightforward ugliness of what he is doing remains mostly implied. The fairy-tale surface gives the film enough distance to approach material that would be almost intolerable if rendered naturalistically.

Calling Laurin folk horror is trickier. The isolated community is certainly there, as are the black dog, o...