Sunset Song **** (2015, Agyness Deyn, Peter Mullan, Kevin Guthrie) – Movie Review

Terence Davies’s extremely moving and emotionally powerful 2015 coming-of-age epic film Sunset Song is adapted from the devastating 1932 classic novel by Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

Veteran British auteur Terence Davies’s extraordinarily moving and extremely emotionally powerful 2015 coming-of-age epic film Sunset Song is adapted from the wistful, devastating and tragic 1932 classic novel by Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

The acting is intense and convincing, while Terence Davies’s gritty and deeply romantic poetic realism direction is superb and his writing honest, faithful and true.

Agyness Deyn stars as young heroine Chris Guthrie, who endures great hardships growing up in the farm of her appallingly stern father (a scary Peter Mullan) in a rural Scottish community. Her abused brother Will (Jack Greenlees) somehow manages to escape. Bit while still a teenager, Chris inherits the farm and falls for a nice local boy called Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie).

Just when warm love and true happiness seem to be hers, the impact of the First World War comes crashing down, bringing the shock of the rapidly changing modern world to bear on Chris and her community in the harshest possible of ways.

But Chris’s incredible strength, intelligence and empathy as a person, as well as the endurance of the land that she feels a part of, allow her to look beyond tragedy and tentatively to the future.

Quite beautifully filmed, with the landscape and skies as much of a star as the actors, this labour of love is an endlessly haunting, special vintage piece of cinema. It was shot in New Zealand and Luxembourg, as well as Scotland. The exteriors are shot on 70mm film and the interiors on digital cameras. Played by James Adamson, the pipes in the closing scene were acquired from the Caledonian Society of Uganda and were made at the turn of the last century by Glens of Edinburgh. How’s that for authenticity?

Terence Davies died at his home on 7 October 2023, aged 77, after a short illness.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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