In a quaint village somewhere in the north, judging by the accents, the new vicar Rebecca Holland (Tuppence Middleton) seems to think she’s made some progress connecting with the locals. Mind you, turnout for Sunday services yields barely enough souls for a game of five-a-side. But the community seems friendly enough to her and her husband Henry (Matt Stokoe), and they seem to have paid the family a compliment by choosing the Hollands’ pre-pubescent daughter Grace to be some kind of angel with wheat sheaf wings for the upcoming harvest festival.
Alas, it seems Rebecca has never watched The Wicker Man because, if she had, she would have understood exactly what’s going on once Grace mysteriously disappears. Much of what follows is nearly a beat-for-beat rehash of director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer’s immortal 1973 folk horror classic, albeit with some significant divergences from the template in the final act. But even those twists on the original twists are sort of predictable, and in general Lord of Misrule’s director William Brent Bell (best known for the insipid Orphan prequel Orphan: First Kill) can’t work up a proper head of suspense, no matter how many poppets made of human hair and twigs he hangs on trees, or how many creepy old ladies he sets roaming around the village muttering about local demons. Poor Rebecca seems pretty slow on the uptake anyway, even when she comes across explanatory murals pictorially explaining the ancient ways round these parts, just like the ones in Midsommar.
Still, the film’s best decision is to cast the great Ralph Ineson as an ambiguous local figure of note. With his basso profundo rumble of a voice and air of rough-hewn potency, he’s always a striking figure on stage and screen. Having starred in Robert Eggers’ The Witch and featured as the titular supernatural figure of mystery in The Green Knight, he’s becoming to folk horror what Barbara Steele was to 1960s Italian creepfests such as Castle of Blood and The She Beast – and I, for one, am here for it.
