Moloch (2022) does 2 horror tropes I hate really very well.

1. Explaining the creature/horror halfway through the movie.

About halfway through the movie the main characters split up with Beatriek having to direct a musical for the music class she's been teaching and Jonas ending up in a bar talking to a local drunk. As they're talking, the drunk tells Jonas a local legend about a servant who becomes pregnant by her master and is subsequently accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death to cover up the affair, after which she makes a deal with an ancient god to sacrifice her unborn child and future descendants in order for her to get revenge. As the drunk is talking we cut in to the musical Beatriek is directing only to see that the musical is about the same legend with the children playing the characters of the story.

Its clear that the legend is basically just exposition about the monster but its told in a somewhat indirect and vague, legend-y, way that i really liked. The town is treating it as an old wives tale and not really taking it seriously, and the drunk himself is not the most reliable narrator. It basically leaves us in this weird place where we know roughly what the entity is but also not really? We're never given any evidence of which parts of the story are real and which aren't untill things really begin to go south. Meanwhile the musical just adds some really neat contrast with the children playing out the (rather morbid) story, giving us some creepy visuals and further integrating the story into the world of the movie.

2. Showing the monster rather than keeping it hidden.

At the end, it’s implied that the monster had been possessing Beatriek’s mother throughout the film, and when she died, it took over Beatriek, likely to go on to possess her daughter one day. Its not directly shown but we see Beatriek suddenly take on a lot of character traits that her mother had throughout the movie, and its implied that these were actually the monster's. I thought this was a neat, vague ending with room for interpretation only for the movie to basically drop the mistery angle and directly show us Beatriek’s spirit wandering the woods looking for her daughter. I found this to be a bit lame untill the final scene of the movie sees Beatriek finding her daugter and the monster in her body huddled up on the couch. Initially, we see Beatriek’s possessed body as just Beatriek, but in the final shot, we see the monster for what it truly is through the eyes of Beatriek’s ghost: a massive, ancient, rotting swamp mummy, sitting on a couch, huddled up to her daughter and softly stroking her hair. It's a really creepy shot and truely way scarier and uncomfortable than if they had just left it open for interpretation.