Fanny Lye Deliver’d **** (2019, Maxine Peake, Charles Dance, Freddie Fox, Tanya Reynolds) – Movie Review

Writer-director Thomas Clay’s labour of love Fanny Lye Deliver’d (2019) is a thinking person’s horror thriller set in Cromwell’s England on an isolated farm in Shropshire in 1657. You don’t get many thinking person’s horror thrillers, or horror movies as art works, but this is one of them. It commands great respect and attention.

Top billed Maxine Peake does her usual grand job as Fanny Lye, who is living a Puritan life with her oppressive, abusive husband John (Charles Dance) and her young son Arthur (Zak Adams). Fanny and John return from church one Sunday to find two naked strangers have arrived at their farm and taken their clothes and residence in their barn.

John reluctantly gives them food and shelter for the night, but it turns out that the young couple Thomas Ashbury (Freddie Fox) and Rebecca Henshaw (Tanya Reynolds) have ideas far divorced from the Puritan way of life, and are being pursued by a ruthless High Sheriff (Peter McDonald) his deputy (Perry Fitzpatrick) and a Constable (Kenneth Collard).

Fanny Lye Deliver’d is quite the exquisitely filmed art work, with some brio, show-off shots, but it also both visceral and thoughtful. That’s a rare trick to pull off, and Thomas Clay does it in confident style. Giorgos Arvanitis’s cinematography is commanding and imaginative. Thomas Clay’s score, using ancient instruments, is a triumph. Michael O’Connor’s costume designs are lovingly careful. It has the look, feel and sound of Cromwellian England, or at least some ideal approximation of it.

Fanny Lye Deliver’d is a real oddity, a very unusual film in a cinematic landscape littered with movies that are just copies, sequels or remakes of others. Thomas Clay has written a really involving, satisfying, gripping story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, unlike many Film Festival movies. (Whatever happened to film endings? Now we mostly just have films ending.) The period dialogue is good, too, just noticeably there and not getting in the way.

Thomas Clay is lucky to have his four star actors. Maxine Peake seems made for period drama, she has acquired the right haunted look, and commands the screen with just a stare. Peake and Dance both have great faces for the camera, and use them to great advantage.

The drama is vaguely feminist but Clay has written two great roles for the men, and he is fortunate to have Charles Dance and Freddie Fox to play them. Dance is almost astoundingly good, in a magnetic turn as the unbending Puritan, and Fox captures his character’s weird ambivalences perfectly, going from sneaky to nasty to reasonable, to attractive to repellent to appealing in turns – quite a little tour-de-force.

Fanny Lye Deliver’d premiered at the London Film Festival on 10 October 2019.

It was released in the UK on the internet on 26 June 2020.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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