Original title: Noita palaa elämään

1952 was an interesting year for Finnish fantastic cinema. There had been a couple of obscure fantasy films previously (Linnaisten vihreä kamari/The Green Chamber of Linnais (1945) and Prinsessa Ruusunen/Sleeping Beauty (1949)) but it was the duo of Erik Blomberg’s Valkoinen peura/The White Reindeer and Roland af Hällström’s Noita palaa elämään/The Witch/Return of the Witch that really made wave s both at home and overseas. Both are more fantasy than pure horror though with its key theme of the persecution of a woman suspected of witchcraft, The Witch will no doubt help it find a home under the “folk horror” umbrella.

Archaeologist Hannu (Toivo Mäkelä) and his wife assistant Greta (Hillevi Lagerstam) are working on a dig near a remote village in Finland. They’re staying with wealthy Baron Hallberg (Aku Korhonen), a sleazy, womanizing sleaze whose own son Viekko (Sakari Jurkka) can’t find a girlfriend that he can’t be sure wasn’t fathered by the Baron. While exploring a swamp, Hannu and Greta find a skeleton with a large aspen stake through its chest, its hair and clothing substantial clothing fragments preserved by the intense cold. Hannu and Greta dismiss the superstitious locals warning of a 300-year-old witch and her curse and are able to partially reconstruct a dress and a leather pouch containing herbs and a talisman and remove the stake from the skeleton. Back in the swamp, Hannu subsequently finds a naked young woman lying in the grave. At the castle, she tells them that she’s Birgit (Mirja Mane) – which also happens to be the name of the witch. Birgit sets about seducing the men around her, including the artist Kauko (Helge Herala), who is in love with Greta, Hannu and Viekko. The village is soon in uproar…

The plot is fairly basic, even a little derivative perhaps, but that’s beside the point. The Witch is all about atmospheric and on that score it’s a complete success, beautifully shot in moody black and white (the film at times recalls Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932)) by Esko Töyri. The eerie landscapes are assailed by with an eerie wind that blows up out of nowhere throughout the film, bringing with it madness, paranoia and distrust. The somewhat bombastic score from Tapio Ilomäki threatens to drown it out at times, its melodramatic flourishes accompanying even the most mundane of scenes. But that’s the only fault one can find with the film really.

Hällström (credited in this capacity as Viljo Hela) cowrote the script with Kaarlo Nuorvala, adapting a play by Mika Waltari. Collectively, the populate the story with a host of eccentric supporting characters, earthy locals with a crude, sexualised sense of humour. They’re a perpetually horny lot and sexual jealousies run rife in their enclosed community. This is where the film is at its most interesting, in exploring the ways of a small community that might have seemed quite alien even to the Finns in 1952 and would certainly have seemed very odd indeed to foreigners. For a film of it vintage, The Witch is a remarkably frank film, with brief nudity and no coyness when it comes to talk of sexual matters (the lecherous Baron is told by of the village women that “what you pork in the past will come oinking in the future”). You’d have to look high and low – and almost certainly in vain – to find a British or American film of the era quite like this. The Finnish censor had its say, removing the line “I want to hold a young warm body in my arms, in the meadow, among flowers naked, in the warmth of fire, in the warmth of blood” but the frankness certainly helped it no end when it made it to American and European arthouses.

At the heart of an impressive cast is the striking Finnish actress Mirja Mane (born Impi Maria Mirjami Mane) whose lack of inhibitions when it came to nudity caused quite the stir at the time. She brings a genuinely ethereal beauty to the role of the much-persecuted Brigit. She only made five films (The Witch was her second) in a career sadly cut short by her untimely death in 1974 at the age of just 45. She’s an alluring presence here, a bracing and flirtatious elemental force shaking up the stifling stuffiness of the village. Everywhere she goes, there’s an angry, superstitious mob waiting to throw her back in the swamp, the men driven mad by her beauty and their inability to control her, the women loathing her on sight and just about everyone terrified that she really might be the much-feared reborn witch.

For part of the time, we’re not sure if she’s who the villagers think she is but as the film progresses, her supernatural nature becomes less uncertain. She makes a horse disappear and reappear with the wave of a hand, summons a snake from out of nowhere and she herself comes and goes in the blink of an eye. Hällström and Nuorvala’s attempts to wrong-foot us don’t always work as we’re fairly sure from the very start that she’s the executed witch reborn (the Finnish title translates as “The Witch Returns to Life” after all) but it still works to a degree, the madness of the villagers casting just enough doubt on their beliefs and suspicions.

The Witch is a fascinating curio, an atmospheric film that never really scares (though it is quite creepy at times) but which offers other pleasures a-plenty. In the States, it was confined to grindhouses where audiences would have been titillated by the passing nudity but baffled by its arthouse pretensions – though that didn’t stop Larry Buchanan more or less remaking it as The Naked Witch (1961). In Europe, it was treated with more respect but today is less well known than it really deserves to be, partly due to its relative scarcity in English language versions. Sinister Cinema released a subtitled version in 2022 on DVD which has helped to raise its profile immeasurably but if ever there was a film crying out for the hi-def treatment, it must surely be this beautiful and, in so many ways, bewitching film.