“To raise a child, an entire village is needed,” is a Nigerian proverb that is in Andreas Prochaskas “Welcome Home Baby“Is quoted. Any village may also need to have a child left away: At the age of 30, Judith (Julia Franz Richter), an emergency doctor in Berlin, learns that she originally comes from a small kaff near Vienna. When she was four years old, she released her parents for adoption, now her biological father has died and has headed his house, which was also his practice. Because Doctor Eduard Sarsteiner was also a practicing general practitioner in his community.
Together with her partner Ryan (Reinout Scholten van Aschat), Judith goes back to the place of her early childhood, which she has no longer has memories and to whom she does not want to make anything in the future: Book an accommodation in an inn, which washered House should only be visited and soon sold. But when they stand in front of the pension, it seems closed and their reservation is suddenly canceled online. So Judith is forced to spend the night in her family. There she is already welcomed by a housekeeper who does not seem to have moved out of the house and introduces herself as a “Aunt Paula” (Gerti Drassl): “You certainly can't remember me,” she says to her, but She recognizes the little girl from the past immediately as if it had never been gone.
Judith (Julia Franz Richter) imagined the return to the village of her early childhood very differently – definitely less bloody …
From the beginning, such a subtle familiarity between the village and the recipient is forced, but Judith does not seem to feel in the slightest from her side. Parents give away their children if they would otherwise have to grow up in precarious circumstances or would make serious illness to family life, but the living conditions of the Sarsteiners seem to have been the very best. Everyone in the village likes to remember Judith and seems to be well informed about their life in Berlin. The next morning someone is in front of her door and asks for medical help. And even the other residents of the village have no doubt that the daughter who has returned will take over the father's house practice, they soon call “Ms. Doctor”.
Judith's future seems to be increasingly closer to an interrupted continuation of her past. The children's room in her parents' house could have been her own in the past, but maybe it was also prepared for ahead. Because Judith seems to expect a child – and why she does not simply leave the only obviously ominous place again, she soon no longer knows exactly. Their perception of time blurs: Again and again she wakes up from daydreaming knee -deep in the water of a pond or on the velvety moss of a dark forest …
An expert for many horror genres
Anyone who has ever broken up from the province as a young adult knows all too well the indefinite fear that the place of one's own origin could sooner or later be able to go home and withdraw. This fear may occasionally take shape in dreams, but it is also a grateful topic for horror films. With “Welcome Home Baby”, director Andreas Prochaska returns to the cinema ten years after the “Das Dark Tal”, an adaptation of Thomas Willmann's novel.
His previous filmography passes through a preference for various genre stimuli, which rarely feel in those misanthropic temptations, as is usually associated with popular Austrian filmmakers by Michael Haneke (“Funny Games”) to Jessica Hausner (“Club Zero”) brings. In his films, he is more likely to seek connection to common playing styles and traditions of an international genre production, as has become rather rare in Europe.
It is no coincidence that you need an entire village to raise a child …
Where his breakthrough film “In 3 days you are dead” and its no less successful sequel once the conventions of teen slasher and backwood horror on the pop cultural height of the middle zest American horror films, as they have been produced by A24 (“Hereditary”, “Men”) for several years, recognize:
The tribalistic abysses of the village community also visually refer to films such as “Midsommar”, the rather strict, concentrated image structure, on the other hand, to the work of Osgood Perkins (“Longlegs”). And yet the film is by no means exhausted in this endeavor: Prochaska always knows when it is sometimes good with metaphor-heavy subtness. In its unconditional, enjoyable emphasis on affects, “Welcome Home Baby” is primarily a classic, wonderfully effective staged shocker.
Conclusion: In “Welcome Home Baby” Andreas Prochaska tells of the horror, who can lurk in his own origin. Even if the film sometimes seems to be leaning against current, too meaningful genre productions, it is staged in the heart in a classic and stylish effect.
We saw “Welcome Home Baby” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown as the opening film of the Panorama section.