Rating: C+
Dir: Gareth Evans
Star: Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, Lucy Boynton, Mark Lewis Jones
This isn’t quite what I would have expected from the director of The Raid: Redemption and its sequel. I mean, you go from two of the most highly-regarded action films of the 21st century, to a Gothic horror about a weird religious cult, which has more in common with The Wicker Man. I admire the willingness to go outside your comfort zone, and try something different. But I can’t say this is successful, except in brief spurts. Not long after the start of the 20th century, Thomas Richardson (Stevens, looking like a young Christopher Lambert) goes to a remote Welsh island, where his sister has been kidnapped. She’s being held for ransom by a group run by ex-convict Malcolm Howe (Sheen).
These are not just your average bunch of preachy wackos, however. They practice blood sacrifice to the island’s guardian, a mother goddess on whose good graces the place depends for its fertility. She’s not exactly happy about it, and there is no shortage of dissension, for various reasons, among Howe’s congregation. His daughter, Andrea, is making moist eyes at the newcomer, while another couple is planning to elope. Thomas has no shortage of issues either. He lost his own religious faith after being tortured as a Christian missionary during the Boxer rebellion in China, and is estranged from his father. However, I would be hard-pushed to say either of these have any significant impact on the movie. That may be the biggest problem here: too much extraneous “stuff”.
This runs 129 minutes, which is almost half as long again as the original release of The Wicker Man. It feels like it is also half as long again as necessary for the core plot – Thomas rescuing his sister. Instead, we get threads which add little to proceedings. There’s a lengthy arc in which the son of one of the group’s founders is having extra-marital sex with the daughter of another leader, gets his girlfriend pregnant and is punished for his sins. The ruthless torture will stick in your mind. Everything that led up to it, probably less so. We have too many scenes of Malcolm creeping around the settlement in the dark, presumably looking for his sister.
It is by no means a poor concept: it feels like a period version of The Sacrament, with an outsider becoming part of a cult that ends up far darker than they could ever have imagined. This is considerably more fantastical, and on occasion it does work well enough. There’s a great scene where Thomas is lined up with the other newcomers in front of Howe, who knows there’s a cuckoo in their midst, and are required to quote from the cult’s scriptures. The tension here is palpable. There’s no doubt that the violence, when it occurs, is gnarly, realistic and occasionally stomach-turning. Yet I couldn’t help feeling the film is in need of an “anti-director’s cut”, with about thirty minutes trimmed from it.