Kier-la Janisse’s 2021 documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched proved that folk horror is global. Yet the roots of that bloody tree will always grow deepest in Britain.
It’s all in the juxtaposition of the sceptered isle’s lush and constant greenery with its rough and magical malice. That subtle violence blooms in the opening moments of Fantastic Fest selection The Severed Son as narrator Magpie (Emma Appleton) coolly explains how she is going to poison her husband – and she does just that, before mutilating his body. The law seems unlikely to ever seek justice, not in this religious community, in an unnamed corner of England in what seems, but is never stated, to be the 19th century. It’s not just that poisoning has for centuries been the aggrieved wife’s method of dispatching her husband undetected. It’s that she’s the daughter of Father (Toby Stephens), a bull of a man who rules this isolated sect with soft words of salvation and implied intimidation. But in a community where everyone turned a blind eye to her husband’s sins, maybe she must transgress to get a little justice of her own – and not just by skipping Sunday service or two. Feminine wrath has summoned something from the moors, so those accusations of witchcraft may well have some truth to them. But what if that wrath is justified?
Writer/director Dean Puckett has taken a circuitous route to telling this story, but one that maybe grounds him better than most in folk horror. He’s not simply emulating The Wicker Man, as so many neo-folkists do and as he did in tongue-in-cheek fashion with his 2018 short “Satan’s Bite: or The Foolishness of the Witchfinder Thomas Eastchurch.” Yet while The Severed Sun may have sprung thematically, narratively, visually, tonally, and even musically from a short of his from a year earlier, “The Sermon,” it also connects to his 2013 documentary Grasp the Nettle. That incendiary work followed a community that decided to reclaim a piece of scrubland, and in doing so reconnect to the soil of England. They too were seeking vengeance against the powerful, and that’s reflected in Magpie’s struggle with Father, who has scarcely-kept secrets of his own. Let’s just say that repression in all forms is his strength and weakness.
But most of all, Puckett realizes that folk horror will always bear forth its bloodiest fruits among England’s ferns and moss. That’s where monsters both uncanny and very human will be found – the latter in the shrieking form of Jodhi May (Defiance, A Quiet Passion) as May, the community’s self-appointed moral guardian.
But the core of the film is neither May or Magpie, but Stephens as Father. He talks like a small-town English clergyman but walks like a boxer, bulky in the way of a man who works fields rather than works out. There’s the tragedy of power about him, and his willingness to use the myth of Magpie’s monster comes with a surprising sense of sadness. If only he weren’t so at odds with whatever it is that lurks in darkness, a literal demon rather than simply metaphorical, then he could have been a hero.
Instead, he’s part of a slow tragedy, one that is almost ritualistic in its inevitability. Puckett’s tone is slow and formal, so much so that even at a scant 81 minutes its texture may become torpid. Even the brief explosions of fatal violence are fleeting, grisly though they are. But for those who find themselves enchanted by Puckett’s mud-splattered daytime horror, there is still mystery and magic here.
The Severed Sun
UK, 2024, 81 min.
World Premiere
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This article appears in September 20 • 2024.