*Sennentuntschi* has almost everything you might reasonably order from the folk-horror cupboard: an Alpine community, an old legend, lonely goatherds, absinthe, a woman apparently conjured from straw and household debris, and the suspicion that something ancient has wandered down from the mountain. The problem is that the film keeps opening the cupboard, throwing in another ingredient and forgetting what it was cooking. Its central idea is terrific. Three men drunkenly enact the legend of the Sennentuntschi, constructing a woman for their own gratification, only for a real woman to appear. That should leave us wondering whether folklore has become flesh or whether frightened, violent men are simply turning an abused woman into a monster because the story gives them permission to. Instead, Michael Steiner keeps explaining, complicating and re-complicating. Present day, 1975 and earlier events are folded together with so little visual distinction that disorientation becomes less an unsettling formal strategy than an administrative problem. Even the Alpine landscape struggles to provide the isolation the story needs because the film continually jumps between hut, village, church and investigation without establishing how these places relate to one another. The soundtrack is similarly restless. Huge, ominous orchestration competes with Serge Gainsbourg and a T. Rex cover as thou…

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