Cult Cinema: The Shout (1978) - Reviewed

Courtesy of the British Film Institute

The legendary Polish writer-director Jerzy Skolimowski has enjoyed renewed artistic success recently with his updated take on Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar with his existential donkey promenade through contemporary Poland EO.  Despite keeping busy including dabbling into television work and cameoing in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers as a Russian general as well as David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, the director is revered by figures like David Lynch and yet has coasted under the mainstream radar for years doing his own unique brand of audiovisual storytelling.  A director whose approach to cinematic language is frankly revolutionary with a dreamy freeform style of editing and juxtaposition to further probe the human psyche, Skolimowski represents one of not only Poland’s but the world’s greatest filmmakers whose work and artistic grandeur is only being recognized now.

 
Which brings us to his 1978 British low key weird British horror thriller The Shout, a metaphysical chiller which was billed as another devil horror film in the vein of The Exorcist or The Omen but in actuality confidently defies categorization.  A star-studded event featuring Tim Curry, Jim Broadbent and Robert Stephens, the film begins as a strange ensemble on the grounds of a mental institution before boiling down to three characters, a young couple Rachel (Susannah York) and Anthony Fielding (John Hurt) and Crossley (Alan Bates), a mercurial drifter who begins ingratiating himself into their home and eventually their love lives.  Anthony works in his home built Devon sound studio as a composer, experimenting with sound engineering and innovation.  Sound becomes key to this trio as Crossley grows steadily more sinister, claiming he killed his wife and children before further implying he has cultivated thanks to an Aboriginal shaman how to produce a shout so deathly loud it will kill all animal and human life within an earshot.
 
Based on a short story by Robert Graves and rewritten for the screen by Skolimowski and Michael Austin, The Shout while ostensibly a genre thriller pushes into narrative detours, asides and areas few films even consider venturing off to.  Sound wise, despite being in mono, the film is a sensory treat for the ears and soon the whole experience of perceiving sound itself is called into question as we’re watching.  

Much of the film’s strength comes from the cloaked long-haired Alan Bates who has always been a fine British actor.  Ranging from his work in Far from the Madding Crowd, Women in Love and The Rose, here we see Bates in full blown shamanistic occult form, functioning as a mad adversary while also being like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs a home invasion thriller about alpha male masculinity versus polite civility.  Also coming into play are fine performances from John Hurt and Susannah York who are at first intimidated by the stranger but gradually Hurt feels more threatened while York seems to take a liking to the peculiar yet domineering male figure in their home.

 
Mostly though, the real stars of the film are director Jerzy Skolimowski and his editor Barrie Vince who concoct a kind of concerto tapestry of the footage, veering freely off into incidental asides and surreal detours into nebulous emotional arenas.  While designed as a kind of nightmare, The Shout has the hypnotic power of a dream where the stranger and more seemingly supernatural the elements of the story get the more we can’t stop sitting forward in our seats watching intently.  Visually the film is handsomely, ornately composed by cinematographer Mike Molloy and Genesis musician Tony Banks and Michael Rutherford contribute incidental electronic arias that pepper the work discreetly throughout, giving the whole piece an ethereal ambience that’s at once comforting and oddly disturbing.
 
Despite coming and going without much more than a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes, in the years since the film has been championed by the likes of Mark Kermode and recently the British Film Institute released a restored collector’s blu-ray of the film in the United Kingdom.  Seen now the film is clearly paving the way for the abstract free floating narrative editing design of directors like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and arguably even his own Polish competitor Andrzej Zulawski.  

While a British production filmed in English, the director’s unique structural design carries over from film to film irrespective of language, making Skolimowski something of a confident master firing on every cylinder whether the audience can fully absorb it all or not.  Some of the greatest films ever made are the ones that don’t tie up everything neatly in a bow but stick in your mind and invite you to return for further investigation.  One thing is for sure, the mystique surrounding The Shout is part in parcel to the film’s longstanding cult appeal as one of the most experimental and technically innovative films of the 1970s!

--Andrew Kotwicki