"Welcome Home Baby"
A painful return to the roots

“Welcome Home Baby” is an Austro-German horror film directed and co-written by Andreas Prochaska and presented at the 75th Berlinale. This was not Prochaska's first appearance at the Berlinale, and he was warmly welcomed by the Zoo Palast audience at the film's premiere.

By Marion Reimer et Marie-Luce Ramsay

It's the story of a young woman named Judith, married for three years, who roams the streets of Berlin at night behind the wheel of an ambulance. Her past is rather nebulous and intriguing. Overnight, Judith and her husband inherit an Austrian villa hidden in a country village previously owned by the heroine's father.

If the transition from town to country quickly disconcerts the viewer, the eerie appearance of each of the villagers helps create a strange atmosphere that works very well given the film's genre. After their arrival at the family home, Judith begins to have gloomy nightmares about her past, which seems strangely linked to that of the village and its women in particular. We watch helplessly as Judith descends into madness. The film's final act is a veritable feast for horror fans. The shots of the final scene remind of a Goya painting!

A reappropriation of the witch theme

It's only about two-thirds of the way through the film that we realize we're in for a witch movie packed with references and symbols to the classics of the genre and folk horror in general. First of all, the parallel between the witch and the modern woman. From the start of the film, it's clear that Judith is a strong, independent woman who has undergone many trials, both in her professional life and in her family reality. The meaning of the word witch is twofold: “1. a person who is credited with having usually malignant supernatural powers; 2. a woman who is believed to practice usually black magic often with the aid of a devil or familiar”. [Merriam-Webster] In Welcome Home Baby, we are offered a somewhat different approach; the man is completely relegated to the background. Here, the witch becomes a feminist symbol of women taking control of their destiny. The woman is the one and only mistress on board in this story... It is a grandiose reappropriation of the witch theme. The horror is amplified by an original use of horror themes such as the labyrinth. Its walls are endless; here, roads act as walls, paths that never lead out of the village, and no escape is possible. There's also the notoriously abusive jump-scare, which almost never manages to frighten. However, there are several effective jump-scares in the film, often in the manner of Tchaikovsky (who used to slip cannon shots into his compositions to wake up his drunken listeners). The use of landscape also communicates a gloomy, unwelcoming atmosphere. We're talking here of vast, dark, suffocating forests, again recalling the idea of the labyrinth, often strewn with fog.

In short, while the horror genre often plays on the recycling of its own clichés, Prochaska succeeds in proposing something innovative by using the imaginary of the witch to effectively address feminist issues. And, of course, the film's greatest strength remains its ability to create a strange, haunting atmosphere of great beauty, despite its disturbing nature.