A malevolent creature is unleashed when a young woman rebels against her
isolated religious community.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Dean Puckett
Starring: Emma Appleton, Toby Stephens, Jodhi May, Lewis Gribben, Barney Harris, Oliver
Maltman
Arguably the two biggest influences on cinematic folk-horror of the past
half-century are 1971's The Blood on Satan's Claw and 1973's The Wicker Man. The recent revival of the sub-genre has mostly taken The Wicker Man's template of an outsider finding themselves in danger when they enter
an insular community, but the more interesting recent offerings (The Witch; Starve Acre) have skewed closer towards The Blood on Satan's Claw, with a community bringing an outside threat into its fold.
For his feature debut, The Severed Sun, writer/director Dean Puckett takes the latter path.
Like Robert Eggers' The Witch, it's the story of an evil force being unleashed by a woman's yearning
for something greater from her life.
Unlike Eggers' film, which was specifically set in pilgrim era America,
Puckett's debut keeps its setting ambiguous. The drama plays out in an
isolated religious community in England but the clothes suggest it could
be any time in the last hundred years, or perhaps even some dystopian (or
utopian, depending on your zealotry) future where folk have returned to
the land and embraced primitive beliefs. You might even find yourself
waiting for a reveal along the lines of M. Night Shyamalan's The Village.
It's in this ambiguous milieu that we find Magpie (Emma Appleton),
who fatally poisons her abusive husband and makes it look like he was the
victim of an unconvincing wood-chopping accident. When Magpie lops off her
dead hubby's hand in the woods, the act seems to summon the arrival of a
mysterious beast with glowing eyes and a silhouette that resembles some
ancient wood carving of Satan. The villagers find Magpie's claim of
innocence dubious, but as her father is the village pastor (Toby Stephens), the de facto ruler of this community, they keep their opinions to
themselves. When another abusive local man is killed by the beast while
visiting his daughter's bedroom at night, Magpie finds herself accused of
witchcraft.
The Severed Sun does little in narrative terms to stand out from the increasingly
crowded folk-horror market. It's yet another movie that uses the sub-genre
and its trappings to explore female liberation in a patriarchal society.
The trouble here is that Magpie is fully liberated from the movie's first
frame, and she has no problem standing up to her father, or anyone else in
the video. That she's engaged in an affair with her stepson David (Lewis Gribben) makes us wonder if her husband was really abusive or simply an unwanted
obstacle. Nothing about Magpie's persona, which is essentially that of a
21st century feminist, marks her as the sort of woman who would put up
with spousal abuse. We're left to wonder why Magpie remains in this
community, which appears to be on the fringes of modernity. Had the movie
been explicitly set in say the 16th century, her entrapment would have
made more sense. Similarly, an unexplored subplot concerning David's
homosexual yearning for the pastor's apprentice (Barney Harris)
might carry more weight if we knew which historical period this was all
playing out in and thus aware of the stakes.
If The Severed Sun's narrative never quite offers enough to reel us in, folk-horror fans
will be kept engaged by the atmosphere Puckett builds here. Working with
cinematographer Ian Forbes, Puckett creates some strikingly
gorgeous images, backgrounding the thematic bleakness in natural beauty.
The compositions of the community at work are of the sort you find hanging
in English country estates, but Puckett ensures we see the grim reality of
the lives of the people who inhabit such idyllic portraits of England's
green and pleasant land. The beast is an impressive creation, and there's
some nice effects work that render its slimy black tentacles as they
burrow through the land like a time-lapse of some invasive knotweed. The
brooding synth score by the band Unknown Horrors adds to the ticking clock
feeling that a reckoning is coming. The Severed Sun looks and sounds like a classic piece of folk-horror; it's a shame
its human drama isn't more convincing and compelling.
The Severed Sun is in US cinemas and on VOD from May 16th. A UK/ROI release has
yet to be announced.
