Hundswut (2024)

In a small village in Bavaria in 1932, four teenagers are brutally murdered. To reassure the villagers, the council, led by Mayor Bernhard “Hartl” Aichinger and wealthy farmer Georg Steiner, blames the crime on a rabid wolf. As rumors grow louder that the murderer must be a person, or even a werewolf, a hunting party is organized to kill the wolf. During the hunt, they find another murdered woman and the bloodstained Joseph Köhler, who is notorious as a hermit and lives alone with his daughter Mitzi at the edge of the forest. Since the National Socialists are just then gaining the upper hand in Munich, Hartl does not want to report the murder case there. The village priest, Hias Lechner, comes up with a solution: following the instructions in the “Malleus Maleficarum,” a medieval guide to witch trials, Joseph Köhler is accused of being a werewolf under ecclesiastical law. When Joseph refuses to confess to the crimes, opinion on the council turns increasingly against him. What began as a “means to an end” becomes a guide for the trial, until the men no longer shrink from violence. The torturer is the otherwise peace-loving innkeeper Ludwig “Lugg” Kramer. This prompts his wife, Mini, to act as a voice of reason alongside the village’s other women and try to prevent the worst. But one night Joseph escapes from his cell, and shortly afterward the village teacher is found dead; all doubts seem to vanish. When Joseph is then threatened with the torture of his daughter Mitzi as well, on the charge of incest, he finally confesses to all the crimes—including incest with his daughter. To his horror, not only he but Mitzi too is sentenced to death: in three days, both are to be executed in the village square, before God and the whole village. The women make one last desperate attempt to stand against the madness that has taken hold of the otherwise reasonable villagers; Joseph, however, refuses their offer to help him escape because he does not want to leave his daughter alone. Thus all their efforts are in vain; father and daughter are publicly executed. At the last moment, Lugg steps out of the crowd, puts Mitzi, who is burning at the stake, out of her misery with a pistol shot, and then shoots himself. The film ends in a classroom, where the teacher reads aloud the ending of Franz Kafka’s *The Trial*.