Somebody always decides what counts as heresy. In Didier Konings’ Heresy, originally released in the Netherlands as Witte Wieven, that somebody is nearly always a man. Frieda lives in a harsh medieval Dutch religious community where a woman’s value is measured by the children she gives her husband. She hasn’t given him any. So her body has become everyone’s business.
Frieda does what she’s been taught. She prays. She keeps the rituals. She obeys. None of it helps. An attempted sexual assault sends her running into the forest the village has declared forbidden, and there she meets something tied to the old legend of the Witte Wieven. Then she comes back from a place no woman is supposed to survive. The village has to explain that somehow, and witchcraft, sin and demonic influence are the only words it owns.
Anneke Sluiters Carries the Film
Anneke Sluiters is the reason this works. Her Frieda starts out trying desperately to function inside the rules, because those rules are the only map anyone has handed her. From there Sluiters takes her through fear and anger into something far more feral. Much of that happens through her body, and the role asks a lot of her physically.
Sluiters never lets Frieda shrink into a symbol. She plays a frightened woman whose private pain has been dragged into the open and used as evidence against her. Len Leo Vincent plays her husband Hikko. Léon van Waas, Reinout Bussemaker and Nola Elvis Kemper fill out a community that’s always ready to judge.
A World That Feels Lived In
Didier Konings comes from concept art and visual effects, and it shows. He storyboarded the film himself and approaches the medieval world with the eye of someone used to designing images before they exist. Working from Marc S. Nollkaemper’s script with cinematographer Luuk de Kok, production designer Paula Loos and composer Sebastien Romero, he builds a settlement that feels inhabited. The palette stays muted, and the lighting does serious worldbuilding. Nobody looks like they’re wearing a costume on a set.
The folklore matters just as much. The Witte Wieven belong to this landscape and its mist and woods, and the characters speak in Dutch Low Saxon dialect. That keeps the supernatural rooted in one specific place instead of generic witch lore. The village calls the forest evil. The film is far less certain. Whatever waits out there offers Frieda another kind of power, but it stays ancient and alien and not exactly safe.
When the supernatural finally arrives in full, it gets more physical than a lot of restrained folk horror dares to. Practical gore and VFX carry the payoff. There’s a sharp tension between how ugly things get for the bodies on screen and how carefully every shot is composed.
The Trouble With an Hour
Heresy runs about 61 minutes. It came out of Koolhoven presenteert, a Dutch genre film initiative, and that length gives it serious momentum. It never pads and never circles back. For the most part I’d call it concentrated rather than shortchanged.
The cost is the mythology. The Witte Wieven and the beliefs around them deserve more room than an hour allows. Some supporting characters and pieces of Frieda’s transformation feel compressed too. The frame is familiar folk horror: a strict religious village, an outcast woman and a forbidden forest. But the Dutch folklore, language and look keep Heresy from feeling interchangeable.
What Frieda Finds
Heresy isn’t really asking whether God or the forest is real. It knows that calling a woman a witch often reveals more about the accusers than the accused. Slowly, the village obsessed with rooting out evil becomes harder to trust than whatever it warned everyone about in the woods. What Frieda finally meets out there is something outside the system that has spent her whole life telling her what she’s worth. Maybe heresy just means refusing the story powerful people told you about yourself.
Heresy arrived on UK digital from GrimmVision on September 28, 2026.
