The Goat Horn (1972) Capsule Review

This review originally appeared as a contribution to Fred Barrett’s Electric Dreams as part of his Electric Trio column on Substack, looking at underappreciated or largely forgotten works.

A folk tune rises above howling winds, lulling us into Metodi Andonov’s mesmerizing 1972 rape-revenge fable The Goat Horn. Set in the 17th-century Bulgarian countryside, the film follows cattle herder Kara Ivan (Anton Gorchev) and his daughter Maria’s (Katya Paskaleva) quest to kill the four Ottoman feudal lords who raped and murdered Maria’s mother. Nine years after the harrowing event, Ivan has trained his daughter as a killer and has raised her as a son, cutting her hair short and beating her whenever she pulls her punches. It’s perhaps a stripped-back version of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960), more Stygian than heavenly, light-on-dialogue, and atmospherically suffocating as Andonov and cinematographer Dimo Kolarov lean into the gloomy poetry of the stark, unforgiving Bulgarian landscape, enshadowed and angular.

Andonov and screenwriter Nikolai Haitov explore the buried femininity of Maria’s character as she struggles against the merciless hunter that her father has tried to forge her into, hesitating to finish off the culprits who killed her mother and embarking on a love affair with a benevolent farmer who shows her the joy of subsisting off the land. Considering its bleak subject matter, there’s a surprising sweet streak underlying Maria’s character arc — there’s even a waterfall kiss, and with Paskaleva selling the moment with the grinning-and-brimming ecstasy of someone in a moment of profound transfiguration, it’s hard not to be affected by the sincerity of the image. Alas, even after their bloody quest has been fulfilled, Ivan refuses to relinquish control of his daughter, and Andonov’s final reels doom the world of The Goat Horn to a hellish cycle of violence and tragedy.

Andonov died only two years after the film’s release, leaving The Goat Horn without a large body of work to compare it to or situate it within. Still, a lot of these ninety minutes are spent not just with the violence but with the Edenic portrayal of nature as well — tranquil cattle-herding sequences, the joy of fresh fruit, the reaching clouds — moments that recall Akira Kurosawa’s samurai dozing off in flower beds or Terrence Malick’s farmers tilling fields, cocking their heads to see if the clouds still lay above them; images that stay with us just as much as the violence does.