Moloch

1991. Young Betriek hides in a closet in her family's house at the edge of a Dutch peat bog, trying to catch a mouse, while someone upstairs attacks her grandmother. Betriek hears the screams; blood seeps through the ceiling and runs down the wall by the closet door. She survives. She never sees the killer. The murder is never resolved.

Years later, adult Betriek — a widowed musician — has moved back into the same house with her parents Elske and Roelof and her young daughter Hanna. The town is full of old legends about a servant girl named Feike and an ancient god named Moloch.

An archaeological team led by a Danish researcher named Jonas is excavating preserved bog bodies — women whose throats were cut in a ritual fashion. Separately, a local man wanders into the bog at night as if compelled, sees a figure in the mist, and dies of exposure in a hole he dug himself. The archaeologists discover the bog bodies span different historical periods. The bog has been a ritual killing ground for centuries.

Betriek's family is full of strange habits. Elske has seizures and a compulsive tic of pocketing sugar packets in cafés. Roelof drinks, is paranoid, and has installed cameras around the property. The locals whisper about a curse. Hanna rehearses a school play retelling the legend: Feike was a servant girl who became pregnant by her master Walter; Walter's wife Helen accused her of witchcraft; in rage, Feike made a pact with Moloch to give Helen and all her descendants to the god in exchange for revenge. Helen's spirit was torn from her body; her bloodline was bound to the bog forever after.

One night a man named Radu — one of the dig workers — shows up dazed in Betriek's kitchen, says "they're making me do it," and tries to slit Elske's throat the same way the bog victims were killed. Roelof kills him with a hammer.

Elske's seizures worsen. At the hospital, a strange little girl tells Betriek in a foreign language: "she never died." Betriek visits the dead local man's father, who hypnotizes her — under hypnosis she relives 1991 and confirms that the woman murdered upstairs was her grandmother. Sonja, an archaeologist on Jonas's team, runs DNA on the bog bodies and tells Betriek they are all from the same maternal line. Betriek's line. The bog women are her ancestors.