15/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Andreas Prochaska sends a woman off on a search for her roots, only for her to discover a haunting secret in a small Austrian village

A burning woman screaming in the woods. A group of sinister onlookers in the background. The reason is unclear. The message is obvious. This is a dark, ominous place that one should not come to visit. But without a protagonist caught up in this dark web of occultism, possible murder and supernatural spookiness, there is, of course, no story. And so it is the place that protagonist Judith (Julia Franz Richter) is poised to turn up at sooner or later.

Director Andreas Prochaska, whose Welcome Home Baby has premiered in the Panorama section of the 75th Berlinale, has always had a knack for transplanting big-budget US setups into an Austrian landscape, whether it be the horror movie Dead in 3 Days [+see also:
trailer
film profile] or its sequel Dead in 3 Days 2, where a group of teenagers with a dark secret are killed off one by one, or his gritty Alpine western The Dark Valley [+see also:
trailer
film profile], in which a stranger is seeking revenge against the townspeople for what happened to his mother. Welcome Home Baby, on the other hand, is not quite sure what it wants to be.

Judith, a Berlin-based paramedic, shows up in a tiny Austrian village with her husband, Ryan (Reinout Scholten van Aschat), because her birth father, who gave her away at a young age, has left her his house. The tiny village, with a big motorway bridge looming over it like an alien, immediately gives us reason to believe that something is off. The locals, including Paula (Gerti Drassl) and Frau Ramsauer (Maria Hofstätter), are thrilled to have Judith back among them. The lost daughter has returned. “Now you are going to stay with us,” is a repeated remark – one that Judith merely brushes off. She is only here to take care of administrative business, sell the place and go back home. Further inquiries as to whether she and Ryan are planning on having any children, as well as the unwillingness of anyone to tell her what happened to her birth mother, already give a sinister whiff to proceedings.

Prochaska knows how to build up a moody atmosphere. His DoP Carmen Treichl creates exactly the kind of images that one would expect of a psychological horror-thriller – the dark woods, the eery colouring, the lingering on corners and shadows. Something is lurking there, trying to draw Judith in. Soon enough, her reality seems to get more and more obscure: she wanders off, “awakening” in a pond in the woods, time seems to jump around rapidly, and her husband tells her she keeps putting off the return to Berlin, instead having set up shop as the village doctor.

After a night of passion, resulting in Judith's pregnancy, the women of the village keep circling in on her. Only a single voice, that of old, blind Hannah Schatzenberger (Erika Mottl), warns her: “They will take your child” and that she has to be “stronger than her mother”. The fact that it’s the women, who usually tend to form a nurturing community for a mother-to-be, are the sinister, supernatural force in this story, and farmer’s son Franz Scheichl (Gerhard Liebmann) the sympathiser, seems odd but could potentially pay off… That is, if Prochaska knew what kind of story he wanted to tell. Is this a cynical comment on the lack of village doctors in rural areas? A critique of the romanticism that enshrouds small, endogamic communities? A look at generational trauma? Because the style and the pleasure of seeing Austrian female acting royalty such as Drassl, Hofstätter and Inge Maux in one film is not enough. As in any horror film, there has to be a theme, a trauma it wants to tackle. Unfortunately, here, as a viewer, one does come out rather empty-handed.

Welcome Home Baby was produced by Austria’s Lotus Filmproduktion and Germany’s Senator Film Produktion. It is distributed internationally by Global Screen.