It’s a tale at least as old as the Salem witch trials. Where Arthur Miller looked at the mania that gripped early colonial-era Massachusetts and saw a metaphor for the red scare rippling through the United States of his day, in recent years it is ideas around gender that have driven artists to craft stories about witch hunts, both historical and speculative.

Svetlonoc (Nightsiren), the suspenseful, mist-shrouded second feature from Tereza Nvotová, falls into the latter category. The film centers on Šarlota (the wild-eyed Natalia Germani), a young woman who returns to the mountainous Slovak village from which she fled, together with a childhood swiftly revealed to have been punctuated by trauma, some two decades ago. The homecoming is hardly a joyous one: she is met first by the charred ruins of her mother’s old cabin, then by the cagey glances of the village inhabitants. Certainly, her decision to squat in the haunted cabin next door – in Šarlota’s youth, the residence of a woman said to be a witch – doesn’t help endear her to the superstitious locals.

Only one person seems interested in her arrival: Mira (Eva Mores, evoking Leelee Sobieski in a magnetic screen debut) is a herbalist with a brazen streak, and a relative newcomer to the village herself. Like Šarlota, Mira harbors secrets – but both women reject the burgeoning whispers that their bond is one founded in any kind of sorcery. After all, a proclivity for bathing by moonlight or dancing by fire does not a witch make. Try telling that to the townsfolk, though. Read more
- Keva York

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.