
There's nothing we can't face, except for bunnies
dir: Daniel Kokotajlo
2023
Brrr. Things are fucking grim up north. Yorkshire, to be specific. I can’t remember the last time I ever saw something set in Yorkshire that wasn’t dismal in almost every aspect of its being. Dales or moors, hills or glades, the entirety of the English canon of films make it seem to be a place more desolate than the moon’s surface.
And then there’s this flick. It takes what for many of us is the foreboding of knowing it’s depicting Yorkshire; a bucolic, idyllic looking place on the surface where dread permeates everything, and then adds misery, child death and the menace of the supernatural.
I actually like movies set in these kinds of areas, in that I enjoy footage of serene fields bordered by rock walls, of ancient trees, of heaths and earth. I don’t have negative or paranoid associations with them, and yet flicks like this work overtime to remind us that humans are not entirely welcome on certain bits of this green earth.
Juliette and Richard (Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith) have moved from the city back to Richard’s childhood home in Yorkshire in order to bring up their beloved son Owen (Arthur Shaw). Owen is unwell, and possibly deranged. Very early on he mentions that someone is whispering to him, and that’s before he stabs a pony in the eye for no discernible reason. We aren’t given enough time to wrestle with the implications and the logistics of trying to help a mentally unwell young child, because he is not long for this world.
So, yeah, parental grief is a major theme here. A child dying young is literally every parent’s worst living nightmare. Well, maybe not every parent. Most parents, let’s comfortably say. There are definitely some shitty parents that aren’t too put out by the idea. But this isn’t about them. This is about two parents that are horribly afflicted with grief when their son dies, and they have distinctly different ways of dealing with that grief. I guess even using the term “dealing” is loaded, because it’s about how they don’t handle their grief that really makes the flick kick along.
There is a whole bunch of folkloric stuff going on in the background, but for me that’s not where the merits of the flick lie, if it has them. The mother is stricken by her grief, and immobile, but the dad is gruff, uncommunicative, and fixates on a manual task (digging up parts of the estate) to the exclusion of all else. How are you? Fine, no complaints. What, you mean, even with losing your son? Sure, all good. Nought to do but carry on.
Men, eh? The flick completely and utterly leans in to the emotional uselessness of men unable to process their own emotions, or admit that they possess them in the first place.
Ignoring his wife, ignoring almost everything around him, Richard starts digging up the earth, and finds the skeleton of a hare. As he puts its bones in a box, he notices, with his trained academic’s eye, something unusual happening.
Hmm, wonder if that’s going to play a part in the story…
Juliette’s sister comes around for support, but mostly is there to be an irritant. An irritant and the voice of reason as the married couple seem to lose their marbles entirely.
This is certainly a flick of horrific subject matter, and some horrible things happen, but it’s a pretty slow burn getting there. If you’re not the kind of weirdo who likes marinating in an uncomfortable rural atmosphere as increasingly awful things slowly build up, well, this isn’t going to be for you. And most of the discomfort, of the horror, comes from the sound design and the musical score. This flick really, really depends on the discordant, abrasive score. Without it, it would be an odd flick about country people doing odd stuff and not communicating well, until the reveals at the end, where everything we thought/hoped was bullshit comes true, and everything we thought was innocent is not so.
As grieving, bonkers parents, Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark do too well; there are almost too many scenes of them acting bereft and or like there will never be a solution to their pain. Thankfully, though, it doesn’t veer into the melodramatic (for most of the flick). There are scenes of hurtful words and such, but they’re not trying to get awards for it, so they’re not screaming at each other like Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson in Marriage Story.
Oh no, no such melodramatics for them. These are British people, after all. Matt Smith is best known for playing the Doctor a bunch of seasons ago, but I think he’s eventually going to get to a place where he is liked, even respected as an actor. He did well in The Crown, and in Edmund Wright’s Last Night in Soho. Not so great in that terrible Moebius flick. He does really well with the Yorkshire dialect here, so well that he’s practically incomprehensible, just like the rest of ‘em.
Of the horrors that are visited upon the good people of this town, well, I can’t really make an argument that they don’t deserve it. English people, I mean. Although considering how many flicks I’ve watched recently, British flicks, that depict the earth or the soil itself as their enemy, I have to wonder what it is about these old Celtic / druidic etc myths that makes these fears so primal and prominent for these peoples of this sceptered isle.
After all, what I thought British people were most afraid of was foreigners. Turns out there’s something worse to fear, and it’s both showing emotion AND something in the ground beneath their feet.
It’s not a pleasant film, it’s not a heart-warming one. The feeling of early gloom that it begins with only deepens over time, until by the ending it’s just a feeling of devastating brutality. It’s in alignment with the rest of the movie, but, damn, there is a lot to unsettle here.
It's a different kind of horror flick, not a lot of jump scares, and one that lingers with you and leaves you still feeling a bit sick afterwards (if you’re a parent of young children: If you’re not, you are the envy of the world, no matter what gross presidential candidates say about you and your childless, cat-abundant ways).
7 times in many ways this is not a tourist ad for Yorkshire out of 10
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“The gods are just, the gods are fair, they let Jack free and into our care. The price we pay is one two three, to let joy pour from the Whistling Tree” - Starve Acre
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