Heresy runs short and cuts deep, which is the right trade for a debut. Didier Konings doesn't have the runtime or budget to build a world the way Robert Eggers does in The Witch — he has a village, a forest, and a woman whose body becomes a battlefield for the community's fear. That's enough, and he knows it. The setup is brutally efficient. Frieda escapes an attempted rape by the local butcher Gelo — a man introduced eating a pig foetus and announcing he likes his meat weak and defenceless — and flees into the woods, where antlered dryads apparently offer what medieval medicine and her dismissive husband cannot: fertility. She returns pregnant. Gelo turns up dismembered but, in the film's most disturbing detail, still conscious. The village reaches for the explanation it always has ready: evil woman, devil's work, burn it down. Konings doesn't complicate this reading so much as concentrate it. Frieda and the 'wise women' of the forest (the film's original Dutch title) are less fully realised characters than symbolic coordinates in a moral diagram — and the film is honest enough about that. This is fable logic, not psychological realism. The feminist argument isn't smuggled in; it howls. What the village cannot control — female bodies, female desire, the natural world itself — becomes, by village logic, monstrous. The film doesn't explain this; it shows it with the matter-of-fact grimness of a fairy tale that never pretended to be anything else. Where Konings earns real credit is in the visuals. His background in concept art and VFX surfaces in a handful of miasma-wreathed, near-Dionysian trip sequences — moments where the forest doesn't just threaten but seduces. These sequences have an almost hallucinatory warmth against the film's prevailing cold grimness, and the contrast does the thematic work without belaboring it. Frieda's ecstatic surrender to nature isn't coded as corruption; it's coded as release. The village's horror at that surrender tells you everything about who the actual monster is. The comparison to Eggers and Ari Aster is the review's most generous claim and also its most instructive one. Konings doesn't yet have Eggers' command of period texture or Aster's ability to sustain dread across a long runtime. What he has is something earlier-career and more interesting to watch: a filmmaker who has identified exactly which tool he needs and is using it without waste. The question isn't whether Heresy is as good as The Witch. It isn't. The question is whether this is a debut that earns the comparison as a trajectory — and it does.
