Shudder Saturday: The Severed Sun (2025)

With the striking imagery of a woman raising an axe against a bright yellow background, The Severed Sun definitely had a poster that caught my attention when I saw it in thumbnail form. I hadn't heard anything about it though, and could only surmise that it seemed to be a slice of British folk horror. That was enough for me to decide on giving it some of my time.

Emma Appleton plays Magpie, a member of an isolated religious community. Magpie is the subject of much discussion when her abusive husband is violently assisted off this mortal coil. Her father, The Pastor (Toby Stephens), thinks he can still help to fix things, and help her by presenting a new husband (John, played by Barney Harris), but maybe another force is ready to guide anyone who believes in it strongly enough. 

Written and directed by Dean Puckett, making his narrative feature debut after years spent working on various shorts and documentaries, this is more interesting than it is successful, but there's a lot here to mark Puckett out as someone very capable and very worth keeping an eye on. He does well with the central idea, as well as allowing his cast to flesh out their characters in a way that I didn't expect when I noticed the relatively brief 80-minute runtime, but there just needed to be one or two other tweaks to tilt the whole thing into something truly unsettling and horrific. For as much as I enjoyed watching how this played out, I am not sure who else I would recommend it to.

Appleton, who I last saw in Lola, does well in the lead role. She gives a performance that establishes her character as bold and defiant enough to make those around her uncomfortable at the idea of how much she could upset the established order of things. It also helps that she spends a lot of the runtime battling against Stephens, doing a good line in sanctimony, and an insistent and unfriendly "neighbour", portrayed very effectively by Jodhi May. Harris does well enough, as do the likes of Lewis Gribben, Oliver Maltman, and James Swanton (the latter unrecognisable in a beastly role).

Puckett doesn't add anything truly exceptional to the general conversation about patriarchy and misogyny that has been more and more prominent throughout the last decade, but he handles the potentially difficult material well, and includes some moments of impressively striking imagery. While this isn't his first film, strictly speaking, it certainly feels like a good calling card for whatever might come next. And whatever might come next is something I will be interested in checking out.

7/10

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Prime Time: Get Duked! (2019)

Get Duked! enjoyed a good festival run last year, if my memory serves me right, but I didn't catch it. It was then titled Boyz In The Wood (which I think is a better title) and I just didn't fit it into my schedule when it was a potential viewing choice back then. I'm glad I finally got to it now though.

Rian Gordon, Lewis Gribben, and Viraj Juneja are, respectively, Dean, Duncan, and legend-in-his-own-lunchtime DJ Beatroot. They're all in a bit of trouble, which leads to them being signed up to the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme. They'll be dropped into an area of Scottish countryside and left to make their own way to a pre-determined point, with a number of factors being rated during their experience. One of those factors is teamwork, which looks a lot less likely when they're joined by Ian (Samuel Bottomley), an eager young man who actually volunteered for the scheme. In fact, getting to their destination at all starts to look very unlikely when the teens start to be hunted by a gun-toting "duke" (Eddie Izzard) and his wife (Georgie Glen).

Written and directed by Ninian Doff, Get Duked! is a fantastic feature debut from someone I'll now be eager to see more from. Doff has built up a decent selection of music videos in his filmography, having worked with the likes of The Chemical Brothers, Kasabian, Miike Snow, and Run The Jewels, and he delivers a film that crackles with energy, genuinely great humour, a smattering of hip-hop, and class warfare.

Funnily enough, as light and disposable as the film may seem, in some ways, it's that last element that separates this from many other riffs on The Most Dangerous Game. The people doing the hunting here are the ones we have seen in the news more and more lately, usually for all the wrong reasons. People that have everything they want, take whatever else they fancy, and don't think the rules apply to them. They're not breaking the law. They're helping to maintain a natural order.

The script is sharp and witty (there's a monologue here from a scene-stealing Alice Lowe, talking about a bread thief, that is one of the funniest things I have enjoyed in years), the soundtrack is very enjoyable, and the very end scenes bring everything together in a way that is both ridiculous and yet also absolutely satisfying, and bound to make you smile.

It also helps that every single cast member is doing top work. The young leads are about as perfect as you could want them to be. Gordon and Gribben are very standard . . . idiots (certainly in how quick they are to just try whatever idea first comes into their heads), Juneja keeps having an opinion of himself that doesn't seem in line with his rapping abilities, until he discovers an unlikely fan base, and Bottomley is the kind of young man you just know has a favourite Thermos flask. Izzard and Glen are suitably menacing as they stalk their prey, more so in the way they really don't seem to try and hide their homicidal intent, and Jonathan Aris is the teacher responsible for dropping the teens off and leaving them to their own devices. You also get some Highland police officers (the two main ones played by Kate Dickie and Kevin Guthrie), their quest for the aforementioned bread thief nicely juxtaposed with a more dangerous potential threat, and a farmer (James Cosmo) who ends up being gifted a DJ Beatroot CD. Cosmo has given many great performances over the years, but the sight/sound of him driving his tractor while singing along to some juvenile penis-centric lines of rap should be high on any list of favourite Cosmo moments.

This would double-bill nicely with Attack The Block if you want to see both urban and rural adventures of youths being hunted by dangerous predators. I'd argue that the enemy here is much more dangerous than any alien entity. And I'd also argue that this is the better of the two films, but there's not much in it, and let's revel in the fact that the past decade gave us both.

9/10

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