While the Heimatfilm genre typically portrayed friendly people in colorful landscapes, the northern German landscapes in Hans König’s drama are unfriendly and dark, photographed from impressive angles and overshadowed by a foreboding sense of catastrophe. Such catastrophe occurs when a farmer who becomes obsessed with marrying a young and innocent girl ends by raping her. Seeing no way out, the girl decides to die in the moor. She will be saved at the very last moment, but the ending is not without moral ambiguity. König’s story is embedded in the mythology of the region, where the shadows of Swedish ancestors who invaded the country centuries earlier are threateningly present. The film opened a new and unexpected dimension to the Heimatfilm that could only have been introduced by someone from outside the genre.