Gwen

We may not yet be in a full-blown renais­sance of folk hor­ror, a sub­genre par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar in British cin­e­ma in the 1970s, but sev­er­al recent high-pro­file offer­ings indi­cate a bur­geon­ing inter­est in films eschew­ing tra­di­tion­al mon­sters and boogey­men for sto­ries of the land, com­mu­ni­ty tra­di­tions, and, occa­sion­al­ly, reli­gion dri­ving hys­te­ria and hauntings.

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in Eng­land and Kill List flirt with folk hor­ror in both peri­od and con­tem­po­rary con­texts; Ari Aster’s Mid­som­mar has an iso­lat­ed Swedish village’s rit­u­als caus­ing ter­ror; and Robert Eggers’ The Witch has the explic­it sub­ti­tle A New-Eng­land Folk­tale. Gwen, the debut fea­ture from TV vet­er­an William McGre­gor (Poldark), fits neat­ly into this scene in terms of its use of land­scape and how its writer/​director flirts with macabre folk­lore to fuel a near-suf­fo­cat­ing sense of dread.

It’s the mid-19^th cen­tu­ry in North Wales, where the last lin­ger­ing influ­ences from the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion con­tin­ue to dis­rupt the lives of those attempt­ing to get by through more tra­di­tion­al means.

A young girl, Gwen (Eleanor Wor­thing­ton-Cox), is try­ing to hold her farm home togeth­er amid a plague of mis­for­tune. Her father has not returned from war, her stern moth­er (Max­ine Peake) devel­ops a strange ill­ness, their near­est neigh­bours have mys­te­ri­ous­ly died, their crops are rot­ting, and the ruth­less head of a min­ing com­pa­ny seems to be manip­u­lat­ing the local pop­u­lace to help him seize Gwen’s family’s land.

The film’s great­est asset is its set­ting. Windswept Snow­do­nia is pre­sent­ed as a sort of grey lim­bo realm, sit­u­at­ed just above the under­world, even with­out the addi­tion­al sights of cholera-strick­en corpses and the charred bones of a slaugh­tered sheep flock being used for an attempt­ed means to ward off a sug­gest­ed evil.

It’s the ulti­mate end­point of McGregor’s aus­tere atmos­phere that dis­ap­points. It’s obvi­ous­ly not a require­ment that every folk hor­ror lead into overt fan­tas­ti­cal ter­ri­to­ry – like, say, The Witch – but while Gwen’s end­ing cer­tain­ly pays off its theme of patri­ar­chal forces being total bas­tards, its ini­tial impact is one of under­cut­ting its ear­li­er super­nat­ur­al motifs. The con­clu­sion con­tains hor­ri­fy­ing acts, but it plays as mis­er­abil­ism more than the cul­mi­na­tion of a spooky story.