FrightFest review – Wrath of the Gods

FrightFest review – Wrath of the Gods

(photo by Robin Keane)

After the suicide by drowning of fisherman Ingram (Jamie Rhodes), widow Anna (Christine Schaldemose) arrives on the North Sea island of Hel for the funeral, bringing along her young daughter Gudrun (Martha Robinson).  There’s a mystery about Ingram’s death and the island is much given to Viking ceremonies, hideous abuse behind closed doors, shunning outsiders like Anna while blaming them for bad luck, grumbling over the terrible hard lot of fisherfolk and being worn down by weather, isolation and booze.

There’s a further division between neo-Pagan and harsh Christian (the local minister is called Knox, of couse) and between the mostly silent women and violent, impulsive evil blokes – ‘ill men’ – with beards.  The bigger the beard, the bigger the bastard.  Ingram’s father Tulloch (Francis Magee) has the biggest beard around.  Hel flies more red flags than a military parade in Moscow but Anna sticks around after the funeral even as the omens accumulate.  A Hel girl goes missing and it’s presumed to be down to the bad luck brought by Anna – who finally snaps and tells Tulloch she’s sure he had more to do with her husband’s taking his own life than she did.  Anna takes an evening off to go to a Viking party with a librarian and they spend the night together … the next day, Gudrun has gone missing.  Tulloch, as protective of his ‘jewel’ as he is dismissive of Anna, takes up his shotgun and seeks vigilante justice.  Anna is forced to ask the locals for help.

The late director Justin Hardy and his brother Dominic collaborated on the script for Wrath of the Gods, based on an idea by their father Robin; the Hardy Boys previously made Children of the Wicker Man, a personal account of their father’s cult film and its effects – mostly ill – on their family.  This scrambles elements from The Wicker Man, sometimes inverting them or even going against the conventions which TWM imposed on decades’ worth of folk horror films with animal masks and sacrificed outsiders.  Again, we have a literally insular setting, locals who are in on secrets, an ostracised but disruptive visitor, missing girls, folk music in the pub, Pagan dress-up and a climactic primitive ceremony (with water as the purifying element rather than fire).  But this film recognises the charade-like inauthenticity of TWM, which features English, Australian, Swedish and Polish actors putting on (or dubbed with) Scots accents and has a genre film gloss.  Dialogue here is often in Norse-influenced argot and the supporting cast are drawn from a ‘Hel Dramatic Society’ – the feel of the film is more like the Michael Powell of The Edge of the World or the Robert Flaherty of Man of Arran than the ad man mystery/horror of The Wicker Man.  Authentic isn’t necessarily better, and this is unlikely to undo the spell of The Wicker Man any more than the Hardy’s documentary did … but this does have a rough, raw, wind-whipped saltiness which is distinctive.