Mudbrick

If you want HORROR, you won't get it here. This is an unwatchably drawn-out, all-talk no-bite family drama in which annoying characters wallow in endless scenes of rural misery, quarrels, torment, suffering, and misfortune.

If you want FOLK horror - you won't get that here either, at least not in a satisfactory form. The story is absurd: in a village in Eastern Serbia, the villagers worship ancient god Veles by praying to a wooden totem on a field, but also to a random tree outside the village, they keep wooden carvings with something they call Veles in their mudhouses, and they constantly repeat Glory to Veles!

If you want SERBIAN horror - you won't get that here either. The film is 95% in English, and 5% in MACEDONIAN, which is not spoken in the part of Serbia where this was shot.

Everything here is offensively fake, forced and unconvincing, starting from the very premise: namely, the father of a man who lived in London dies, and leaves him - a wretched mud hut in a dying Easter European village. And this guy comes from London to Serbia, to that wretched village, and decides to inherit that cottage, to live in it, even though his brother Jakov had always lived there with his wife and daughter!

The film is supposedly inspired by a true event - the only problem is that it happened after World War II, 80 years ago! In a time of post-war misery in some remote village, it made sense for two brothers to have a fierce and tragic quarrel over the inheritance of their father's mud house. Why would a Londoner in the 21st century fight with his own brother in some shithole in the mountains about some mudbrick house - the film doesn't even hint at that. It's taken for granted!

Various things are thrown in this muddled plot, but the execution is unskillful and confusing, so that they produce frustration and alienation, rather than mystery and involvement of the viewer. Instead of horror, we have an unconvincing, rambling and repetitive drama without any receptive elements. Instead of drama we have motivational and character confusion where people do unmotivated and STUPID things all the time, with no consequences.

I do believe that "Mudbrick" might very well be the very first Serbian movie that I have watched.

When I stumbled upon the 2023 movie "Mudbrick" here in 2025 and seeing that it was a horror movie, then of course I opted to give the movie a fair chance, as I enjoy all things horror. Sure, I had never heard bout the movie prior to watching it, so I had no expectations. And in a sense, I suppose, writer and director Nikola Petrovic had every chance to entertain and impress me.

However, I have to say that I found the narrative and the script to be really boring, and I ended up tossing the towel in the ring and giving up on "Mudbrick" 56 minutes into the 87 minutes runtime. I was just simply bored senseless at that point. The script that writer and director Nikola Petrovic put together here utterly and completely failed to entertain me, much less capture my interest.

The only familiar face on the screen, for me at least, was actor Andrew Howard.

As for "Mudbrick" being a horror movie, well, don't get your hopes up. This was, at best, a slow paced dark drama.

If you enjoy horror movies, as I do, I would not recommend you to waste 87 minutes on watching this movie.

My rating of writer and director Nikola Petrovic's 2023 movie "Mudbrick" lands on a generous one out of ten stars.

I really love movies i've seen this compared too such as wicked man or midsommar, but those made sense. They had pace, slow pace but methodical. This seems like there are hints at a message the whole movie, without any practical meaning. I understand you can be vague with folk lore, especially with modern morality involved, but the audience still needs to understand what's going on. Enjoyed some of the ideas, but just never came together in my opinion. Acting was not the problem, but some parts of the script was rather clunky. I wish i had better things to say about this movie because i like supporting movies like this, but it honestly fell flat on so many levels. Cheap visuals, cheaper blood stains. Decent acting, sub par dialogue. Incohesive story tale, incohesive script.

If there was a possibility to rate it with 0 stars, that would be the only realistic rating.

This film should be a horror film, with elements of Serbian, pre-Christian, pagan, mythology. At least that's how it's defined and advertised. None of these definitions have anything to do with reality. Some evaluate it as an artistic folk horror, like Midsommar, and I can agree with that only in terms of complete illogicality, senselessness and bizarreness, which it completely shares with the aforementioned film.

By far the best grade the film can get is from the technical side. Better sound than most "Serbian" films, solid scenography and landscapes. And that's where the story about the positive ends completely. Of course, that's not nearly enough for one star.

The acting in the film is, to put it mildly, disastrous. This is, of course, the greatest "merit" of the director, who is also the creator of the nonsensical scenario. There is almost no meaningful and logical sentence in the film. The dialogues are artificial and illogical to such an extent that the viewer, surely several dozen times during the film, gets the desire to stop watching, because of the itch in the brain caused by the absurdities. The domicile language, supposedly spoken by the characters, should be Serbian. We can barely recognize a dozen words from Serbian in the film, and that's only because the actors actually speak Macedonian, and maybe even Bulgarian. Actors from the English-speaking area could not make an effort to learn the few or so words they say in Serbian so that it can be recognized that they are spoken in Serbian. As someone whose mother tongue is Serbian, I watched the movie with subtitles because I couldn't understand what was being said.

The part about pagan mythology is a special story. In Serbia, at least in the last 100 years, there is not a single place, even in the most rural possible parts of the country, which have practically no contact with civilization, and which are really few, where such cults exist or existed. Therefore, for me, as someone who knows and studies Serbian pre-Christian mythology, this is "close" alost the same as the mythology of the natives of South America, Papua New Guinea or Mozambique. Apart from the terms Nav and Veles, everything else is complete nonsense and the "artistic freedom" of the screenwriter/director.

The attempt to present the story as an arche narrative of struggle and envy between brothers also failed completely. Of course, at a time when the quality of movies is declining exponentially, there will be many who will "swallow" that attempt. However, it must be said that the realization of that aspect of the story is at the level of an amateur theater from some rural village, as shown in the film.

Of course, this film will find its audience. Lovers of the absurd, enthusiasts who don't care about logic. Those who care about "artistic expression", not content. Those who will say that the picture, which has two crossed lines, represents a dilemma, not the lack of talent and creativity of the author. And that's okay. The rest of you, save yourself some time and skip this.

This film is so cryptic that it doesn't even tell you what country it's taking place in. It doesn't tell you anything, really. There's also a lot of whispering and mumbling so you won't understand what little is being said either. Something about pagan worship amidst traditionally Christian people, which makes as little sense as the conflict regarding ownership over a worthless house. There are no scares in this film, there is no suspense to speak of, and there is no payoff for enduring the minimalist and confusing plot. The characters are poorly developed and annoying, making any emotional involvement impossible. Random surreal waste of time.