Keene complicates our feelings about the characters in subtle and useful ways, treating Katla in particular as something more intriguing than a garden-variety evil stepmother, even when she's serving up stew with a cannibalistic secret ingredient.

"The Juniper Tree" is absorbing enough to make one rue there weren't more.

Keene is doing the right kind of critical revisionism-reframing the uncanny, contorted alien logic of folktales within a politically updated dynamic, offering her own interpretation of an old story while honoring its lingering richness.

It visibly prefigures a lot of subsequent independent cinema as well as the growing revival of folk horror on screen.