November

In the real world, magical thinking is a type of fallacy and a source of many superstitions, but in a film like November, it can be the difference between life and death, salvation and damnation. The characters in this Bergmanesque Estonian-German fairy tale, written and directed by Rainer Sarnet, live in a village surrounded by an honest-to-goodness Haunted Forest, although for them it would be weird if it weren’t haunted — to put it in perspective, pacts with the devil are so common that cunning villagers manage to fool the devil by using the sap of blackcurrants instead of blood to sign…

*November* opens with what appears to be a skeletal farm-machine monster bursting into a cowshed. It confronts a cow, hooks it up and then, rather than slaughtering it, flies away with it. That is about as useful an introduction to Rainer Sarnet’s film as you could ask for. *November* spends much of its running time allowing you to decide what sort of thing you are looking at, then quietly informing you that you were wrong. Its Estonian villagers live in spectacular poverty, surrounded by mud, livestock, hunger and the dead, yet supernatural events barely merit comment. Ancestors return for…