Swiss genre cinema rarely swings this hard, and Mad Heidi takes the country's most exported folk image and turns it into a blood-soaked action fantasy.
What is Mad Heidi about?
The setup borrows the shape of a beloved children's story and rewrites it as dystopian pulp: an authoritarian regime has seized control of the country's cheese industry, and a mountain girl named Heidi is dragged into open resistance after she's abducted by government troops. What follows leans into exploitation-movie excess — practical effects, over-the-top violence, and a satirical edge aimed at fascism and consumer culture alike. Director Johannes Hartmann builds the film around a deliberately absurd premise and never breaks tone to apologize for it, letting the fantasy and horror elements escalate scene by scene. Alice Lucy leads the cast as the title character, with Casper Van Dien and a supporting ensemble filling out the resistance and its enemies. It's a movie that wants to be loud, silly, and pointed all at once, aimed squarely at fans of midnight-movie shock cinema rather than anyone expecting a faithful children's adaptation.
About the cast
Alice Lucy anchors the film in the lead role, playing Heidi as considerably tougher than the character's storybook origins would suggest. Max Rüdlinger and Casper Van Dien round out a cast that includes David Schofield, Kel Matsena, Almar G. Sato, Pascal Ulli, and Katja Kolm, each occupying a corner of the film's exaggerated, comic-book-adjacent world.
Context & significance
Mad Heidi arrived in 2022 as part of a small wave of genre filmmaking out of Switzerland aiming for international cult audiences rather than domestic arthouse circuits. Its premise plays directly against the wholesome image most audiences associate with the Heidi character, which is very much the point — the film treats that familiarity as raw material for satire rather than something to protect.
Watching Mad Heidi on Ktime
Mad Heidi is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, and the platform's Farsi-first interface makes browsing and streaming straightforward for Persian-speaking viewers. The film includes Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so it can be watched either way depending on preference.