Away from technology and the simple joys of civilization, a religious commune has existed for many years. The times are hard: the land has long become barren, all those who have chosen the path of asceticism and deprivation are starving and slowly mad. Prayers and appeals to the Lord help us to humble ourselves and endure, but there is a limit to everything.
Plot
The food crisis has not crippled unless Agatha (Catherine Walker), whose plot bears fruit with enviable regularity. Neighbors torment themselves with envy, casually pass by other people's possessions, looking at what the lonely mistress is luring such good luck with.
The settlement is mowing down one misfortune after another, people whisper, nervously nodding at Agatha, they say, is not a witch a woman and will everyone be better if they deal with her. Everyone has their own secret, and no one will know the real truth until the right moment.
Soon the situation turns out to be completely unbearable: a pestilence will come to the village, and from the lands of Aunt Agatha a young maiden will appear with a burning gaze, capable, if she so desires, of any mortal with her own will. Not everyone will be able to get out of this eternal twilight alive. Sometimes accusations of witchcraft are not unfounded, but they often think of the wrong ones.
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Idea
Modern horror after a pandemic will increasingly allegorically develop a motive for isolation. Whether consciously, forced, but this is a trend that allows the concepts already worked out in the mid-eighties - early nineties to be again attractive to American filmmakers.
Through isolation, even occasional horror projects that were filmed well before the epidemic take on a different perspective. The most varied variations of the "Amish" this year are reflected in the popular genre.
The recently published "Wrong Turn", indirectly rethinking the theme of the "first fathers", also represented imprisonment in a commune as a cage, and being in it - a painful eternity, from which one can escape only once, guessing the moment.
"Commandment of Evil" (originally "The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw") by Thomas Robert Lee, however, is more a derivative of "The Witch" by Robert Eggers than from a provocative slasher about murder among those who believe in curses (and for good reason). A viscous, painful story for both the heroes and the audience, the depth of which supposedly adds psychologism. Local dramas, many small subplots that have no special value and significance, frowning hungry farmers listen to the howling of the wind at night and look for the strength to sow something again.
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Who will like
Robert Lee himself does not seem to understand very much what the "Commandment of Evil" means to him. A private story, an exercise in genre, statements about the mores of society, or a pro-feminist manifesto. Hence the pile of scenes from the private life of villagers, talk about the nature and origin of chaos, special attention to everyday life and the authenticity of hungry devastation in heads and homes.
Someone will be impressed by naturalism, but where it is really necessary to shock, the director takes the camera away, half ashamedly, perhaps hoping that the audience’s imagination will itself reproduce and model an image that is much more eerie than the resource in independent cinema.
Certain delights of the American press are understandable: the wind howls, the earth dries, the little witch learns herself - the metaphors are obvious, but they will seem especially effective, as well as Lee's method of surprising the conflict between an infernal girl and a harmful, inhuman society.
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