The Wicker Man

Capsule Film Review #32

This is the thirty-second in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear weekly, in addition to my regular essays.

---

An exceedingly uptight, pious, and puritanical Scottish policeman—see the dictionary entry for tautology—travels to a remote Hebridean island apparently untouched by Christianity. He has been sent there on a wild goose chase, as a sort of elaborate prank, and his bumbling efforts to do his job are continually hampered by any number of distractions, as he tries to persuade the amused pagan locals to put their clothes back on, to be ashamed of their baser urges, and not to put frogs in their children’s mouths.

This could be the set-up to a comedy film, and yet isn’t; on the contrary, it is the set up to what has been called ‘the Citizen Kane of horror movies’: wrongly, according to one of its stars, who denied that it was a horror movie at all.

Like another masterpiece I wrote about recently, The Wicker Man (1973, d. Robin Hardy) is not scary in the conventional sense that a horror movie is scary: doubtless one reason that it has aged so well, since few things date faster than scariness.

You probably know what happens at the end: this film by now (like The Third Man) tends to give away the twist even on its poster. Suffice to say that on Summerisle, and in the universe of the film, God does not exist. That thought, too, could be played as comic, in the nightmare world, which is so often the real world, where we don’t quite know whether to laugh or scream.

---