Here is an atmospherically shot English folk horror from first-time director Dean Puckett set in some eerie time of the medieval past or post-apocalyptic future. It’s possibly a bit derivative: there’s a touch of silliness in the Donnie Darko-ish pagan beast-god rustling around in the foliage, and no prizes for guessing who its final victim is going to be. But there are some chills and bad-dream unease as well, effectively delivered by a good cast, well directed.
Among an oppressive religious community in the remote countryside, Magpie (Emma Appleton) is a young widow who is concealing the truth about her husband’s death from the congregation led by her stern father, the Pastor (a potent performance from Toby Stephens). She is increasingly resented as a disruptive influence when she challenges the patriarchy’s abuse, in the form of what she suffered at the hands of her late husband and the violence that she can sense is being perpetrated on a young neighbouring girl by her father, a violence ignored by the girl’s pious mother (Jodhi May). Concealment and hypocrisy are all about: she herself is having an affair with her stepson David (Lewis Gribben), and the Pastor has an unusually close relationship with zealot parishioner John (Barney Harris).
The awful truth is that Magpie is devoted to an alternative religious force: worshipping a strange pagan deity who can be induced to emerge from the undergrowth to carry out pitiless revenge against the oppressor in return for loyalty. Is the beast Satan? Or is Satan rather the organised savagery of the official church? This is an interesting movie, and a reminder that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is the great ancestor of the folk-horror genre.
• Severed Sun is on digital platforms from 6 October.
