Award-winning director Daniel Kokotajlo made a real impression five years ago with his fiercely distinctive debut feature, Apostasy, set in an enclosed religious world. Here is his diverting but frankly more generic follow-up, adapted from the novel by Andrew Michael Hurley. It is billed as contemporary folk horror but borders on film-school pastiche, and “contemporary” means set in the era of The Wicker Man in the early 70s – a British world of brown corduroy, Austin 1100s, no central heating, odd locals and a persistent, sinister encroaching gloom in the countryside. The movie teeters on a knife-edge between scary and silly, and yet without that weird flavour of silly, the scares wouldn’t mean as much.
Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, two very potent and formidable screen presences, play Richard and Juliette, an unhappy couple who in the time-honoured tradition of Don’t Look Now experience a family tragedy with their young son, with Juliette coming under the influence of a mysterious local woman (not blind, though) and Richard obsessively throwing himself into his work.
