News

For a long time in the popular cinematic imagination, the French countryside was a golden place, of haybales, wildflowers and uncannily beautiful goatherdesses. More recently, mainly thanks to the darker sensibilities of Bruno Dumont and Alain Guiraudie, it has become the dank breeding ground for peculiar stories of rural spite and small-town perversity. This is the new tradition to which Julia Kowalski’s “Her Will Be Done” belongs — not least because it features two Guiraudie familiars in “Misericordia”‘s Jean-Baptiste Durand and “Standing Vertical”‘s Raphaël Thiéry. And though it promises more than it ultimately delivers, mostly Kowalski’s sophomore title is a solid addition to the subgenre, developing into an intriguing mix of heady and earthy, in which folk-horror eeriness fuses with provincial narrow-mindedness, and mysticism oozes through the muck.

The opening moments cement its tonal dissonance as, with a twang of Daniel Kowalski’s spare, uneasy score, a brief prologue with fire,...