Fan­ny Lye Deliver’d – first look review

The wait has been ago­nis­ing. The ques­tion of when the British direc­tor Thomas Clay would make anoth­er movie start­ed to mutate into the ques­tion of whether he’d make anoth­er movie at all. His 2008 film Soi Cow­boy was some­thing fresh, unique and cos­mopoli­tain, a con­trolled and mov­ing yarn set in Thai­land with a Dan­ish star and in thrall to the Ital­ian exis­ten­tial cin­e­ma of the 1960s.

It’s so great that he got anoth­er run-out and I sin­cere­ly hope he has many more, even if this new one, Fan­ny Lye Deliver’d, isn’t per­haps the all-out slam dunk we were hop­ing for. But it is a film which fol­lows its own instincts and is hap­py to retain (and proud­ly dis­play) a few ragged edges, and it’s all the more inter­est­ing for it.

In terms of its milieu, if the apos­trophised past tense verb in the title hadn’t already set alarm bells ring­ing, we’re dropped into the fetid bogs of Shrop­shire, Eng­land dur­ing the ear­ly mod­ern era (mid 1600s). The Lye clan live a peace­able, God-fear­ing life on a des­o­late farm: there’s wound­ed mil­i­tary man and iron-fist­ed patri­arch John (Charles Dance); whey-faced pre-teen son Arthur (Zak Adams); and dot­ing, gen­tle matri­arch Fan­ny (Max­ine Peake).

John is a man who pun­ish­es insub­or­di­na­tion and is quick to admin­is­ter the cane, par­tic­u­lar­ly if he spots the mem­bers of his small brood den­i­grat­ing the teach­ings of the Holy Bible. Their drab, rit­u­al­is­tic life is knocked off its piv­ot when two naked and bruised stow­aways, who claim to have been robbed of their belong­ings, seek refuge in the Lye’s barn. He, Thomas (Fred­die Fox), wins over the sus­pi­cious John with talk of his days in the army, while the light­ly las­civ­i­ous Rebec­ca (Tanya Roberts), becomes close to prim Fanny.

And when all the pieces are on the board, Clay just allows the dra­ma to slow­ly evolve. Ten­sions emerge as Thomas’s loosey-goosey reli­gious and polit­i­cal con­vic­tions are revealed to be extreme­ly out of synch with the more unswerv­ing­ly fun­da­men­tal­ist John. This is no mere home inva­sion thriller, as the writer/​director seeks to explore the idea of our unwill­ing­ness to, if not accept the diver­gent ide­olo­gies of our fel­low man, then at the very least accept that indi­vid­u­als should be free to choose the stric­tures by which they live their own lives.

The film is shot on gor­geous, thick-grained 35mm film, and Clay man­ages to wring much aes­thet­ic mileage from shots of the misty moors, glis­ten­ing expans­es of sog­gy mud, and the dusty bars of light which illu­mi­nates the Lye house­hold. The dia­logue has been writ­ten in peri­od-appro­pri­ate Eng­lish, and the actors make fine work of wrap­ping their tongues around a great many anti­quat­ed expres­sions and terms.

Peake is slow­ly, qui­et­ly prov­ing to be one of this country’s very finest actors, and her stel­lar work here adds to that renown – her char­ac­ter evo­lu­tion over the course of the film is both nuanced and con­vinc­ing. Also, if it weren’t already obvi­ous, this feels deeply indebt­ed to the clas­sic folk hor­ror films of the 1970s, and could almost work as an unof­fi­cial sequel to one of the all-time greats: Michael Reeves’ Witchfind­er Gen­er­al.

As in that film, we see the tide slow­ly turn on the scourge of reli­gious puri­tanism. It doesn’t quite come togeth­er in the seam­less and slick way you’d per­haps like it to, and is ham­pered by an unnec­es­sary nar­ra­tion (intoned, for rea­sons unknown, by Rebec­ca). Tonal­ly, too, it’s a lit­tle all over the place, with what ini­tial­ly feels like an a more art­ful­ly-inclined study of domes­tic anx­i­ety blos­som­ing into some­thing that’s clos­er to revenge hor­ror. All told, it’s great to have a true blue mav­er­ick like Clay back in the sad­dle, and hope his next one comes around a lit­tle sooner.