FrightFest review – Children of the Wicker Man

Children of the Wicker Man

If any film has been squeezed dry by previous making-ofs, retrospectives, reissues, disc extras and general merch, it’s the blessed Wicker Man.  Or Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man as the credits still read – a point which seems to have rankled with director Robin Hardy for the rest of his life.  However, this unusual, personal film has a fresh angle and is in the end very moving and affecting – even if none of the key makers of the original movie come out of it particularly well.

Hardy had eight children by a handful of mothers, and this was made by two of his sons – Justin Hardy and Dominic Hardy – who have inherited a big box of papers to do with the making of the movie and the fallout (bankruptcy, divorce, child abandonment, loss of a home, alcoholism, etc) for the family.  Justin is admirably still furious about his father’s behaviour – ‘fuck Robin Hardy’, he shouts after reading a particularly smug quote from his woe-is-me deadbeat Dad – while Dominic, who saw Robin even less frequently, is more curious if not without his own tendencies to wander off at key junctures.  The half-brothers pore over the papers – illustrated with sketches – and ponder the fractures in the relationships of the Hardys (Robin had his heiress wife sink a ton of money in the production – which she never saw back) and the Shaffers (the screenwriter left his wife for Wicker Man actress Diane Cilento during the production) which pile on top of artistic clashes/struggles as the film has its well-chronicled fall from theatrical release grace and rise to cult movie status.

In the home stretch, the Hardys visit Malta – where their father had a very late-in-life good experience with the film – and run into some shamans on a cliff, who encourage them to join in a ritual just before their private ritual of opening sealed letters their father left during a health scare in the 1970s … then we see a bonfire celebration back in England, offering a positive take on the celebratory/sacrificial/grim finale of The Wicker Man, so that this add-on even goes some way to redeeming paganism after it’s been traduced in their Dad’s movie.