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GWEN
Director: William McGregor Cast: Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Maxine Peake, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Mark Lewis Jones MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:24 Release Date: 8/16/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2019 There once were three farming families in the hills outside a small town in Wales. At the start of Gwen, the elder daughter of one of those families discovers that hers is the last. Something sinister is at work. Writer/director William McGregor's film looks and plays like a horror story, in which the members of that sole, surviving family hear strange noises and, in the case of the eponymous girl, have strange dreams that portend some unknown thing coming for them. Doom seems to be on the wind, in the creaking of the cottage, and within the rusty whine of the gate leading to the family's property. The only thing missing from this tale is a ghost, a demon, or some literal monster. That's because the ghost is a way of life—the farming which sustained Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) and her family, before her father went off to war and people in town seemed to need their goods less. The demon, perhaps, is Mr. Wynne (Mark Lewis), the owner of a nearby quarry, which has become the primary employer for the townsfolk and an enterprise taking up land in the hills. He wants Gwen's mother Elen (Maxine Peake) to sell the farm, but she refuses. Wynne is the kind of man who won't take that as an answer. As for the monster, it's still not a literal one, but it exists, nonetheless. An economic force—for the apparent, greater good of the town—swallows up the people who dare to go against it, simply by living their lives in the way they always have. McGregor's decision to present this story of unassuming, real-world threats as a horror tale is certain to irritate those expecting more obvious scares and more tangible forms of terror. How else, though, does a filmmaker portray an entirely new way of life—that of industry and predatory capitalism—through the eyes and mind of a young girl, who has only known farming, living among the land, and selling fair goods for a fair price? There is nothing more terrifying than the unknown. In suggesting to the audience that there is something we do not understand in or around the cottage, we get an idea of how Gwen experiences the threat of complete, final change to her way of life. Gwen is an atmospheric and potent allegory. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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