directed by Thomas Clay
UK
110 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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There was a large gap between when this movie was finished and when it finally came out, but the wait was worth it, because what an end product this was! Even if it hadn't been such a good movie overall, the sheer fact of how visually appealing it is would have been enough to keep me watching for the whole just-under-two-hour runtime. Everything about it is gorgeously kitted out, from the costuming to the mist covering the farm to the farm itself. Those buildings looked so perfect- if ever a film needed a "making of" documentary, it's this one. I want to know how everything was constructed and how long it took. The whole set feels like the stage for a historical re-enactment and I loved it.
So the film is set at the beginning of the reign of Oliver Cromwell, and the British populace is experiencing a great degree of oppression and hardship and a lack of religious freedom. This is epitomized in the life of Fanny Lye, a woman essentially serving as an unpaid housekeeper to her husband and small son on a farm, never much questioning her role in society or in her family. One day two people show up at the farm begging for shelter from a "highwayman", totally nude, and after they're begrudgingly given a place to stay, they slowly begin to reveal their true morals (or lack thereof). It's a story about Fanny discovering the world of possibilities outside of simply being a wife, but her journey to get there is not a simple path of instant or even gradual liberation- she goes through trauma on the way to realizing her full potential as a human being, a trauma which at times rivals the repression she had been going through up until the two strangers' arrival. It is actually the process of being pushed to her mental and physical breaking point that seems to teach Fanny the ultimate lesson about who she is and who she can be- a message I'm not sure I agree with, as the idea that some knowledge can only be gained by going through experiences that break you as a person is something I don't subscribe to.
I was thinking about how this has some interesting parallels to The Witch and Midsommar. Much like Dani in Midsommar, Fanny Lye had been living with a less-than-stellar partner, and this partner is the avenue through which a group with cultlike characteristics and unusual beliefs targets her. By eliminating him, they make her believe they've dispatched the cause of her suffering, and therefore gain her trust. They make it seem like they want to do something good for her but their intentions don't really ever feel like they're solely for her benefit as a person- they want something of her, even if it doesn't seem like it. And like The Witch, Fanny is a "pure" woman eventually goaded into losing her morality and living deliciously, even if it means an (unwilling) separation from her family.
But where this differs significantly from those two examples is that Fanny Lye has the wherewithal to gather her own lessons from the things the couple/cult is trying to teach her. She's initially receptive to the ideas of freedom that the two strangers preach, but after experiencing their attempts to press these ideas on her fervently and against her will, she decides to take from their teachings the things that would benefit her, liberating herself fully from her former life, but also liberating herself from what would have been simply another life of servitude to a different master. This is evident in her casting away of the relic that was so meaningful to the two, and also in the elaboration of her ultimate fate as she rides off into the sunset at the end of the film.
In between all of this we have other things, of course, not least of which the worst sheriff ever and his sidekick, who proves a long-held opinion of mine that every villain needs a henchman who just slouches around and sneers at things. There's a degree of wry humor to all of this, and the camerawork reflects this- it's filmed really strangely for what it is, feeling much more like a comedy TV series with its occasional fast zooms into characters' faces and the way the camera drifts around like it's being carried by someone trying to duck out of the way of the violence. Really the only bad thing about this movie is that Kate Dickie isn't in it. But Maxine Peake is a good substitute.
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