A pair of druggy, licentious agitators invade a 17th-century Shropshire homestead in this eerie period melodrama from Brit indie director Thomas Clay
Thomas Clay is a
British film-making talent who has been off the radar for a while, and cinema has been the duller for it. There had been nothing since his troubling and shocking debut The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael in 2005 and the Bangkok-set followup Soi Cowboy in 2008. Now Clay has returned with a stark, bleak horror-melodrama of the English Revolution: a 17th-century period piece with eerie echoes of other genres: home invasion thriller, spaghetti western, folk horror, post-apocalyptic survivalist drama. It is a tough, disturbing watch about an ecstatic awakening through violence and – with a twinge – I wondered if Clay had returned to the shock rhetoric of his debut about a rape. As it happens there is emphasis placed here on consent.
Like Peter Strickland, Clay is an authentically independent British film-maker who has come up outside the system and, like Strickland, incidentally, he has a fascination for the near-forgotten tropes and styles of 70s Brit cinema. With playful deadpan, Clay even begins with a spoof British Board of Film Censors certificate from the era, announcing that Fanny Lye Deliver’d has been passed with an “X-certificate” (I think our modern-day BBFC will in fact let it go at a 15).