Hen — a cinematic masterstroke in the rare realm of arthouse horror

style="font-weight: 400;">Nêrens, Noord-Kaap and Donkerbos. Scheepers is, indisputably, a genuine artist with a craftsman’s eye for detail and a gift for transforming cerebral concepts into captivating entertainment.

Shot in gloriously rich, high-definition black and white, Hen is that rare thing: a scary movie that’s gruesome and gory, but is also exquisite to look at. 

There’s enough brutality, early on, to hold you in permanent suspense, and there are images drawn from some deep, dark, nightmarish place that will absolutely make you flinch. With evocations of the same sort of grim surrealism you see in the transgressive photography of Roger Ballen, it’s also downright eerie, packed with signifiers meant to cause unease, and get your stomach in a knot as you try to fathom what supernatural evil is simmering beneath the surface. 

Never mind the harrowing awfulness unfolding in full view.

While the uncanny substrate of the story with its sense of isolation and abandonment is pretty unnerving to begin with, Scheepers has compounded the menace with religious imagery likely to trigger feelings of terror. And there are the associations with cruelty and impending doom sparked by images of mauled bodies, freshly slaughtered animals and casual butchering.

What’s clever (and also quite a lot of fun), though, is that the film’s masterful mechanics force us to speculate and constantly reassess where the locus of evil in fact is. 

At the heart of the story are a husband and wife who eke out a simple existence in what appears to be an early 20th-century, middle-of-nowhere environment riven with post-apocalyptic melancholy. What actors Stian Bam and Amalia Uys so brilliantly achieve in these roles is to channel evidence of that most human trait – hope – into what is an almost unspeakably dire and ultimately hopeless reality.

Their presumably harmonious marriage and sustained absence of contact with the outside world shifts suddenly thanks to the arrival of a boy whom the couple quickly absorbs into their household, assuming him to be the child they’ve longed for – and no doubt prayed for.

But change is destabilising, and – this being a horror film – the boy’s presence soon manifests as something that’s hard to precisely pinpoint. The boy has been cast out, perhaps abused and almost certainly harmed by other people, but who those others are remains a mystery. 

The film’s young star, Dawian van der Westhuizen, is hypnotic as the mysterious boy who, after being discovered under disturbing circumstances, demonstrates a taste for raw chicken eggs, has an uneasy relationship with sleep, and seems slightly mystified by the religious rites of the Christian couple he moves in with. Apart from being marvellously watchable, Van der Westhuizen gives an instinctively sophisticated performance and keeps us on our toes with his startling integration of childlike innocence and impish curiosity. 

Have no doubt, though, that once this boy wraps you around his fingers, you’ll have every reason to suspect that you’re in league with the devil.

As an unpredictable eeriness takes hold, though, there are also scenes of what might be described as domestic bliss: the family cooking together, praying together, attending their makeshift church together, making biltong together, even sharing the odd laugh… They also seem to dream together and, more worryingly, intrude on one another’s convoluted nightmares.

Something unnatural is happening, and there’s the rather tenuous relationship between black and white, night and day, light and dark. 

And, complicating all of this, is the boy’s strange attraction to the hen house, where the family’s egg layers reside in relative peace. For the time being.

The boy has questions, too, and doesn't quite understand human needs and desires. “Why are you so hungry?” he asks of the grown-ups’ craving for meat. You can’t help but sense that he’s interested in other kinds of hunger, too. 

He also doesn’t quite understand the logic informing when it is permissible to kill, and what distinguishes shooting an antelope for meat from killing a domestic animal, like a dog. 

“Because dogs have names,” the man tells the boy. “People also have names,” the boy replies, as if wilfully flicking a switch in the man’s head, reminding him that people regularly perpetrate violence against one another.

And it is quite literally a dog-eat-dog world. When a pair of itinerant storytellers turn up at the house, the man’s instinct is for violence: his immediate reaction is to shoot at the strangers.

As much as the film raises such philosophical questions, though, it avoids the trap of becoming cerebral or sentimental. It is a work of pure, unbridled cinema, and relies on the technical nature of what a movie is in order to convey its story and potentially touch the soul. There are no jump scares and there’s no “scary music” soundtrack (although, thanks to an antique gramophone, there are a few off-kilter tunes that screech their way into the reality of the film, ramping up the eeriness).

Scheepers says he values silence and isolation as vehicles of terror far more than editing tricks, and he prefers a slow-and-steady discharge of unease to a cheap thrill that can be achieved for the sake of a quick-and-easy physiological response. In other words, he wants the film to creep under your skin.

Hen does precisely that. It simply creeps you out.

There is also no attempt to rationalise or explain what is happening on screen. The story unfolds in the place where all genuine horror and supernatural intrigue exist: the viewer’s imagination.

This is without even mentioning the circumstances of the film, the fact that it was shot in the middle of absolutely nowhere, on an old farmstead that’s completely off-grid – no water, power or phone signal. Everyone involved had to trek to this faraway location and take with them every imaginable necessity – because Scheepers knew in his gut it was the right place to make this film. 

Certainly, the farm and its surrounding nothingness are the perfect backdrop for a story about something unknowable – the bleak, barren emptiness feels like a kind of punishment bearing down on the humans struggling to make their way in the world. It’s every man, woman, child and chicken for themselves out here – little wonder there’s such a glut of religious symbols and such an investment in acts of faith. 

Watch these people pray, say grace, trek to their outdoor church or pore over scripture, however, and you can’t help but notice some dark irony. It’s not necessarily because something blasphemous has entered their world, but because of the futility of it all – what you see flickering in the boy’s quizzical eyes is the quietly hilarious realisation that these people have long been abandoned by whomever it is they’re praying to.  

There is a scene, towards the very end of the film, when the man (who we’ve already witnessed in various roles: husband, saviour, father, hunter, provider, protector) is seen scrounging around in utter darkness. Believing it is night, he stumbles across the yard on his desolate farm, every semblance of his humanity torn asunder as he fumbles about, searching for a way to end his misery. The scene, with its unrestrained nihilism, seems like a perfect metaphor for the real-world trauma that’s being mirrored by the film: the frightening possibility that we humans are stumbling about in a state of perpetual, self-imposed existential darkness. 

To escape the nightmare, the man would need to see things for what they really are – he’d need to step into the light and snap out of it. 

But horror movies never work like that, do they? Instead, we see perfectly rational human beings returning to the haunted house – or inviting the monster inside.

While Hen diligently leans into many of the genre’s tropes and archetypes, in execution it has ended up being something utterly fresh and original. There is so much evidence here of an appreciation for the ways in which cinema can be, but this film honours these influences from within the canon by being its own unique thing. It doesn’t so much eschew or break rules but in many ways makes the point that there are no rules when it comes to storytelling, except to stick to your truth, keep the audience guessing and focus on the humanity of the characters, no matter who they are. 

So while there are shades here of, among others, Ari Aster and Kubrick and Lynch and Tarkovsky, I am almost certain that Scheepers will next make a film that is utterly unlike Hen but that will nevertheless feel like a Nico Scheepers movie.

Until then, this one will continue to haunt me. DM

Hen, which premiered at the Silwerskerm Film Festival in August, opens in South African cinemas on 10 October. Good to know is that no chickens were harmed in the making of the film.