The Severed Sun (Fantastic Fest 2024)

Ever since I first clapped eyes on his 2018 short The Sermon, I’ve been assiduously following the work of Cornish based filmmaker Dean Puckett for the last five years. A folk horror tale about a homophobic church community living in rural isolation, the short was imbued with a wonderful 1970s aesthetic and sensibility that recalled the likes of The Wicker Man and The Devils, and had me hooked. A restless creative spirit, Puckett followed this up with Satan’s Bite – a low budget Super 8 short produced for 2018’s Straight 8’s competition that looked and felt like the kind of thing Ken Russell would have knocked up in his back garden. 2022’s Seagull is a vampiric tale upon the English Riviera inspired by Puckett’s experiences as a mental health support worker, and this year’s The Devil’s Footprints is a found footage short inspired by the legendary wyrd bible, English Folklore Myths and Legends. From these, I continued my delve into Puckett’s work with the deep cut of an earlier effort – 2016’s darkly comic Circles. A short about about paranormal investigations into crop circles in Totnes, it starred Oliver Maltman and Lucy Montgomery, and had a very pleasing John Carpenter vibe. To say I’m a fan of Puckett’s work would be something of an understatement, and so it’s with a mixture of anticipation and pride that I find myself watching The Severed Sun – his first full length feature that premiered at this year’s Fantastic Fest.

Made on a limited budget and shot over a fortnight, The Severed Sun is an independent production that recalls some of Puckett’s earlier work – specifically his two shorts from 2018, The Sermon and Satan’s Bite. Once again the setting is his beloved South West of England, where an isolated, Amish-style church community is ruled over by a charismatic yet authoritarian figure known as The Pastor (Toby Stephens). A young woman named Magpie (Emma Appleton), is not only part of the community, she’s also the daughter of its leader and, at the start of the movie, we see her trapped in an abusive, arranged marriage with an older man, Howard (Eoin Slattery). It isn’t long however before Magpie makes a lethal break for freedom for her, her adult stepson David (Lewis Gribben), and her young son Sam (Zachary Tanner), by murdering Howard and staging his death as an unfortunate accident. Unfortunately, many in the community, specifically Jodhi May’s Andrea, don’t believe Magpie’s version of events and suspect her of offing Howard. Confrontations and paranoia set in, and when Andrea’s equally abusive husband Fred (Oliver Maltman), is also found murdered in the bedroom of his daughter Ursula (Flora Lambert), tales of Magpie consorting with a strange ‘Beast’ within the shadowy depths of the forest begin to grip the puritanical community, and The Pastor and his young aide, John (Barney Harris), must work fast if they ever hope to turn this climate of fear in their favour.

The Severed Sun shares much with The Sermon and Satan’s Bite – in particular the theme of female empowerment where each film’s heroine overcomes patriarchal religious traditions, and the thing I really appreciate about this film is that Puckett hasn’t simply replicated the narratives of those earlier productions. When a short filmmaker gets the opportunity to make their feature debut, they often choose to expand upon narratives they’ve previously explored in short form, and so audiences can expect to see a ninety minute film in which, grafted on somewhere in the mix, will be the fifteen minutes they’d seen before. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – indeed, you can see from the reviews of The Sermon on Letterboxd that there’s definitely an audience who would happily welcome that decision, such is their clamour for its narrative to be explored as a feature. Puckett must be applauded for avoiding such easy revisionism while essentially operating in the same universe he’d previously established, which speaks well of his restless spirit as a filmmaker, and the progress he’s made with each production is deeply commendable.

As befits its feature status, The Severed Sun boasts the starriest cast that Puckett has assembled thus far, with established performers such as Toby Stephens and Jodhi May, and the return of Puckett’s Circles collaborator, Oliver Maltman. Alongside them are up and coming talents Emma Appleton (The Witcher, Pistol, Lola, The Last Letter From Your Lover), Barney Harris (The Hollow Crown and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), and Lewis Gribben (Limbo and Masters of the Air). It’s a testament to his pedigree that such talents want to work with him, and he certainly gets the best performances from them. Toby Stephens is excellent as The Pastor, which is a complex role as although he’s the film’s antagonist, he can never truly reveal his character’s true nature as, just like with any leader or statesman, he’s essentially a projection of all things to all people. Many actors would struggle to convey the reality within a character who exists in such persistent artificiality, but not Stephens.

Likewise, Emma Appleton rises to the challenge in the role of Magpie – a character who carries the ambiguities of what’s going on within the narrative, and while there’s a darkness and a danger to her characterisation, it never once eclipses the empathy that the audience has with her. Another strong female character is Jodhi May’s Andrea, a woman who chooses to point the finger of blame at Magpie and stirs up the whole moral panic – seemingly as a means to distract herself from an uncomfortable truth which dwells within her own home. May has long been an actor I’ve personally admired, and her deeply committed performance was as a particular highlight for me.

Barney Harris compliments Stephens very well, his role allowing us to some brief insights into the latter’s private life, and while John picked his side as it were, he’s still a deeply sympathetic character. Harris skilfully draws out these character complexities in his scenes with Lewis Gribben, who brings a distinctive energy to the role of David, himself also an outsider in many ways. Oliver Maltman plays a smaller but no less significant role, and anyone familiar with his work in comedy, or in Mike Leigh’s film Another Year, will be surprised by the unsettling menace and latent violence he imbues in the character of Fred, whilst in the smaller role of his and Andrea’s daughter Ursula, Flora Lambert manages to convey so much trauma and heartache with a look alone.

A technically proficient filmmaker, Puckett delivers an utterly beautiful film in The Severed Sun, and while he’s naturally blessed by the Cornish scenery (the film is shot on Bodmin Moor), it’s important to say that he knows exactly how to shoot the landscape, and its beautifully lensed by his regular cinematographer Ian Forbes. There are some exquisite cross fade dissolves that instinctively speak of the timelessness of the land surrounding his protagonists, and its fair to say that some of the compositions here are so striking as to be nothing short of breath-taking – to the point where I genuinely think this is the most beautifully composed filmmaking I’ve seen in some time.

An early sequence outdoors sees a shirtless Toby Stephens consulting with Barney Harris, before the latter gives his master a cutthroat shave. The camera takes in Stephens front and centre, with his head, neck and shoulders almost as if they are an extension of the rolling and craggy hills in the wide shot behind him, while the shadows of the foreground play across Stephens’ torso (almost like a landscape in itself), making for a beautiful, three-fold layered image that, ironically, looks rather severed itself.

A later scene with Magpie chopping wood is also a strikingly composed sequence that’s arguably my favourite from the entire movie. Puckett focuses specifically on the axe resting in the block while Magpie, in the immediate background, bends over to toss the wood she has chopped aside – her body and its movement initially blocking our view of a quartet of approaching villagers in the background. As she senses them, Puckett affords her a close-up for her reaction, followed by the villagers armed with pitchforks, hoes and spades, standing in formation looking down upon her. We sense the danger that Magpie’s in at exactly the same time she does, and the camera returns in sharp focus to the axe as Magpie’s fingers slowly yet purposefully grip the handle, the better to weigh her options.

So much of this scene is evoked in complete silence – indeed, a lot of the imagery depicted here could work without dialogue or audio and it would be fair to say that this moment could easily play out in another genre entirely, namely Westerns. A later scene features another beautiful dissolve to a silhouette of The Pastor, standing in the doorway of a barn, letting in sunlight, and it’s reminiscent of the iconic image of John Wayne in The Searchers. The shot of the villagers on the hillside put me in mind of another folk horror – the closing shot of Bernard Hepton et al in John Bowen’s classic 1970 Play for Today, Robin Redbreast. Puckett’s genre aesthetics also put me in mind of films like The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Witchfinder General (another folk horror that owes much to the Western conventions), and The Witch, while the disorienting sequence in the forest, shot in monochrome night vision, put me in mind of Jonathan Glazer’s The Fall.

“But what of The Beast?”, you say. Ah yes, well, without going into too much detail that may spoil the movie, this creation is an intriguing one. Said to exist in the darkness between the sun and the moon, it’s both the absolute unknown and the id of the piece – a literal bogeyman upon which the community can hang all of their woes. The decision to create The Beast via a mixture of the CGI abstract (a horned figure whose body is dark void with headlamp-bright eyes), and the physical (the tactile horror of a costumed figure with writhing, lengthy appendages), is effectively “icky” – the latter part of the combination redolent of those traditional ’70s aesthetics.

Beneath the folk horror surface there’s a realism in The Severed Sun that belies Dean Puckett’s other career as a politically-minded documentary filmmaker. It’s no coincidence that the movie’s setting (a puritanical, patriarchy-based sect ruled dictatorially by a charismatic “preacher” in splendid isolation), feels allegorical in this post-Brexit world. Likewise, The Pastor’s speechifying regarding The Beast’s threat as “an abomination … invited into our borders (which), seeks to erode our values” is filled with topical resonance around the populist far-right’s engineering of a so-called ‘migrant crisis’. He subsequently and privately admits to John that he doesn’t believe in its existence, but accepts it as a means control the flock to his advantage, which is an indication of the grift undertaken by numerous newly resurgent political figures. 

The Severed Sun is unmistakably the work of a filmmaker with concerns for where we are as a society, the decision to film on Bodmin Moor perhaps recalling how the county of Cornwall voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union (at 56.5% of the vote based on a high turn-out of 77%), despite much of its funding coming from there. Cornwall has been hit particularly hard by the austerity driven policies of successive Conservative governments, yet it continues to vote for right wing political parties who would continue such measures. It’s primary economy is tourism, resulting in 2,000 holiday homes remaining empty for the majority of the year, while 800 families live in temporary, emergency accommodation. In such a climate, it’s clear that a sense of paranoia and phobia regarding outsiders has been allowed to thrive, which has subsequently been manipulated by right-wing political opportunists seeking power for their own ends.

With this in mind, it’s easy to spot how The Pastor mirrors the political reality and, tellingly, Puckett never makes it clear when The Severed Sun is set. With the costume design and characters working the land without a phone or modern appliance in sight, it certainly looks like the past, but does that mean the community depicted here isn’t more contemporary and much closer to home? Could it be one that has decided to abandon technology and opportunity, and cut themselves off from society in a post-Brexit, post-pandemic world – which again, points to a potent metaphor for modern Britain.

Likewise, when the film develops into the ostracization of Magpie, who’s condemned as a witch and Satan worshipper by a fearful community, it’s important to remember what history has taught us about witch hunts ever since the days of Pendle Hill. Such extreme victimisation thrives at times of social, economic or political crises, whereupon the populace seek to blame someone for their ills – which is often a minority figure, already much subjugated, and historically were usually women (which continues to be the case), alongside people of colour, immigrants, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Dean Puckett’s theme of female triumph over an abusive patriarchy will continue to strike a chord with anyone who finds themselves in a society that lauds the likes of self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, and which sees an average of 140 women killed by men each year in the UK alone.

Ultimately, The Severed Sun is a deeply immersive and atmospheric folk horror in the truest, traditional sense – unlike some recent additions to this subgenre. It isn’t a cash-in based on the success of something like Midsommar as it’s a work truly stepped in distinctly British (or European), horror, nor is it a movie that simply presents the conventions of the genre in a neat fashion without any inclination to examine them or approach them in any meaningful, creative way (yes, I’m looking at you Lord of Misrule). A deeply ambiguous movie, The Severed Sun intentionally presents its audience with a puzzle to savour and return to – one which affords them the opportunity to create their own interpretations and ideas about what they might have seen. It’s a remarkable achievement considering its time restraints and budget, and the film’s experimental and unnervingly atmospheric electronic soundtrack, written and performed by Brain Rays adds to the experience. It’s an auteur’s work – a beautifully considered movie in which all its key components work in harmony and has Puckett’s fingerprints all over it, and once again I’m left hoping to see more in the future.

Mark’s Archive – The Severed Sun (2024)