![]() If this is a parable about masculinity and power, it doesn’t come off. Rivalries among wives and daughters abound, but there’s an insubstantial feel to these supposedly intense emotions. ![]() The bloody lamb is not a pretty sight, and Selah seems to be sent over the edge by it, though it’s not clear if her Carrie-style stabbing frenzy is a hallucination. Shepherd ( Michiel Huisman, pictured above) doesn’t punish her he keeps telling her she's just like her mother. Selah gets her period for the first time when she’s been entrusted with the sacred duty of helping a ewe give birth, but she falls asleep in the sun. Predictably, once you start menstruating you’re unclean and have to go to a dark hut and eat scraps, equipped with only clumps of lambswool to clean off the blood. The preoccupation with menstrual blood wears thin. “I’ve been here so long I don’t know who I am any more,” is all the cursed wife can offer. We’d all like to know the answer to that. “He calls me a broken thing,” says one baleful woman (Denise Gough Colette) known as the cursed wife – she’s the only one with short unbraided hair – warning Selah (an impressively natural Raffey Cassidy Tomorrowland The Killing of the Sacred Deer), whose own mother has died mysteriously, that this will happen to her in due course. He favours pubescent girls older women are often discarded and punished, that is, if they don’t die in childbirth. The outside world will destroy us, he explains, but of course he’s the destroyer. “I have grievous news,” he tells them after the police – a brief glimpse of the flashing lights of the modern world, though it’s irritatingly unclear what era we’re in – warn him that he and his band of acolytes must move on. ![]() The trick is to stare him down.īut there’s no back story, no explanation for the fact that this sizeable flock of American women with their hair in braids, living in poverty and bedding down communally on, of course, sheepskins, are in thrall to a creepy young man who likes to test a gag-reflex as part of foreplay and talks in a quasi-biblical way. Shot in Ireland in County Wicklow by Michal Englert, it’s visually stunning, with dramatic waterfalls, wild forests with sunlight glinting through, boundless mountain vistas and attractive sheep. Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska’s first English-language film (previous features include Elles, starring Juliet Binoche, in 2011, and In the Name Of, 2013) with a screenplay by Australian writer Catherine S McMullen, is beautiful but tedious. If he’s the father of these daughters, things are even darker than they seem. He is surrounded by adoring women (there’s a whiff of The Handmaid’s Tale in evidence) wearing coloured robes: red for wives, blue for daughters. ![]()
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