Irati

 After giving a Basque spin to an ancient European folk tale in Errementari, writer/director Paul Urkijo Alijo turns his attention to the legends of his own country, adorning the margins of the story of the first king of Pamplona with all sorts of mythical flourishes.

 When Charlemagne's armies march towards their domain, the young scion of the local ruling family  turns his back on his Christian faith and makes a deal with Luxa (Elena Uriz), a powerful witch: blood for blood, as demanded by the old ways. He slits his own throat during the battle, and the covenant is fulfilled when giant rocks fall from the sky, squashing the invading franks.
 While the armies fight, his young son Eneko narrowly survives an encounter with a soldier and a lamiak, a river spirit (to the basques, they were apparently men-drowning river spirits more similar to Morgen, Groa'ch, or Rusalkas than the Greek Lamiae). There he meets Irati, the near-feral apprentice to the witch who his father made the deal with.

 With the Franks repelled, the locals are forced to honour the dead lord's deal and bury him in a pagan mound, which the local priests are none too pleased about. In the aftermath young Eneko is sent to get a Christian education elsewhere, and his just-widowed mother is married off to a neighbouring muslim lord to help secure the borders.

 Fifteen years later Eneko (Eneko Sagardoy) returns, saving Irati (Edurne Azkarate) from some sleazy lumberjacks running an illegal logging operation on his land. The eight-century equivalent of an action hero foiling a drug store robbery by chance. When he gets home after that, he's just in time to hear his grandfather's last words. Say what you want of Eneko, the guy seems to have an impeccable sense of timing.

 His grandfather's final request, by the way, is to be buried on hallowed ground by his son. The villagers happily go back on their deal with the witch and exhume the body; During the exhumation, they find that the lord's body has been turned into a goat. Pagans came up with some pretty fun penalties for breaching terms and conditions, it seems.

 Luxa is arrested for rightly calling the Christians out on their bullshit. Later, she tells Eneko that his father's body lies in the lair of the goddess Mari deep underground, along with the treasure from the defeated Frankish army.
 Faster than you can say Hark, a quest!, Eneko sets out to recover his dad's bones, taking along Irati as a guide. They are followed covertly by the henchmen of a duplicitous lordling who's gunning after both the treasure and Eneko's birthright; That conflict will come to a head, of course, but not before they all run into a small selection of Basque mythical beings - all the way up to goddess Mari herself (who sports a gorgeous bit of costume design).

 Irati is a bit of a strange movie - a swords and sorcery saga that's fairly low on adventure, and an epic story that feels slightly less than the sum of its parts. Urkijo Alijo also scripts, adapting a graphic novel (by J. L. Landa and J. Muñoz); But while the script is well constructed, it feels like he couldn't find a good balance between its elements. It's melancholy by design, but that solemnity feels almost at cross purposes with plotting that includes (too few) monster attacks and a dastardly noble rival.

 Visually, though, I have no complaints. The film is gorgeous, with the director, cinematographer Gorka Gómez and the rest of the crew squeezing as much natural beauty out of the forests, caves and mountains they film in as humanly possible. The special effects are low-rent and rely heavily on CGI - but as in Errementari, they complement the film's heightened aesthetics, and there's a ton imagination and a strong sense of visual design on display. That they managed to make this at all with a budget of four million euros is a miracle.

 The characters are fine, and I do like that the main thrust of the movie is for these two people - one following an ascendant faith, the other following a path that's disappearing as she walks it - to find common ground. But the love story is a little too abrupt to be convincing, and the acting a bit uneven; Azkarate cuts an imposing figure (Irati gets a lot of moments where the camera frames her as a badass), while Sagardoy always looks... kind of bemused to be there. He's not bad, precisely, and I think the intention is for him to be out of his depth most of the time - but he doesn't have a lot of presence, which is a huge drawback in the few scenes where it's his turn to shine. More damningly, he doesn't have a lot of chemistry with Azkarate either.

 With all these caveats, I did like the film. File it under interesting rather than great, but there's room for that too - especially if it goes all out to portray a folklore I knew next to nothing about. Plus, there are as many shots of a gloriously unimpressed goat as you could possibly want.