The Goat Horn

A straightforward 17th century tale of revenge which comes to the screen with the well-worn air of a film made at least a decade earlier. A Bulgarian farmer raises his daughter as a boy, training her to kill the men who raped and murdered her mother, a role against which she eventually revolts. The film fails because it refuses to explore the girl's growing awareness beyond the basic requirements of the plot, except once in a scene where she watches one of her mother's killers make love to a woman. In this instance her realisation of the inadequacies of her own concepts, founded as they are on revenge, is confidently handled. Elsewhere, as in her subsequent relationship with a young shepherd, cliché predominates. Altogether something of an anachronism.