Tistlebu
2022 · 18m · Norway
Directed by Simon Matthew Valentine
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
A young urban couple on a working holiday at a Norwegian sheep farm encounters a primordial power bound up in a strange living rock in the barn, and it changes them both forever.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A sentient rock as the engine of body horror and transformation—sure, it's weird, but the film doesn't commit hard enough to the perversity; it's too content to be a moody folk-horror pastiche when it could be genuinely unsettling.
Valentine situates this squarely in the Nordic gothic lineage, and the editing discipline—those long, considered shots of the landscape and the mineral itself—recalls a more meditative tradition of supernatural cinema than most contemporary horror bothers with.
The decision to make the rock's influence tactile and sensual rather than visually grotesque, trusting texture and proximity over jump-scares, is what transforms a modest premise into something that lingers in the body.