LORD OF MISRULE - Mark Reviews Movies

Lord of Misrule, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

The eerie atmosphere of Lord of Misrule is almost a given. Here's the story of the mysterious disappearance of a young girl at an annual folk festival in a small English village, where everyone seems pretty apathetic about the fact. Something is amiss in this little town, but if director William Brent Bell and screenwriter Tom de Ville had any intention of surprising us with that reality, they forgot a pretty obvious guideline of horror. If the filmmakers show us enough creepy stuff too early, it's not at all surprising when even creepier stuff happens later.

The creepy stuff of this movie doesn't quite seem to add up, either. It begins almost immediately, as we meet the village's new vicar and her family, made up of her husband and the couple's daughter. The girl seems to have a knack for making trouble and maybe worse. She pulls out a bit of her hair in her introduction, and then, she proceeds to grab of pair of scissors, hide them behind her back, and make her to the family's pet rabbit. Is there something wrong with this girl that makes her seem curious about the kind of harm she might do to this little creature?

Forget all of that, though, because the filmmakers certainly do. The girl, daughter of the Rev. Rebecca Holland (Tuppence Middleton), isn't a character so much as she's an instant hint about the tone of the proceeding story and, as soon as she disappears, nothing but a plot device. The rest of the movie throws a lot of similar setups and imagery at us. Sometimes, it pays off, like a monologue about an old-timey leader of an ancient religious sect whose final moments of life involved his head being set on fire. Most of the time, though, the movie hopes that the eerie suggestion of a man walking naked into the woods or the unsettling sight of a split-open animal carcass in an alleged kidnapper's shed is enough to frighten.

In a way, such ideas are enough, but in this case, they're also frustrating. Everything we see and that happens here is pointing us in only one obvious direction and trying to distract us from the fact that the outcome is so self-evident. Just as with the unsettling stuff, the filmmakers give away too much exposition too early, meaning that it's simply a matter of waiting for every detail of that information to turn out to be as accurate as it possibly can be. When dealing with a secret cult of nature-worshipping locals whose ancestors had a reputation of sacrificing children to an otherworldly entity, what's possible in such a story should be apparent.

On the positive side, the story keeps close to Rebecca, who's played by Middleton with just enough supernatural skepticism and maternal determination to keep the first two acts mostly grounded in some emotional reality. Her daughter Grace (Evie Templeton) has been selected to serve as the "harvest angel" of the village's yearly harvest festival, which involves the driving out of a demonic figure from the area.

The girl disappears into the forest. The local police start an investigation and a search. Rebecca is certain that nobody is doing enough to find Grace, so she begins an investigation and search of her own. One of those people not doing enough by her estimation, by the way, is her own husband, Grace's father, Henry (Matt Stokoe), who is such a useless character that it's unintentionally amusing—despite the far-from-amusing circumstances—when the movie reveals what his one and only purpose in this story is.

Rebecca's query into her daughter's disappearance and, based on some video taken at the festival, apparent abduction brings her into close proximity with select townsfolk. The main one is Jocelyn Abney (Ralph Ineson, whose imposing frame and even more imposing baritone register are perfectly suited to this material), whose own son went missing under the exact same circumstances several years ago. The vicar appeals to their similar fear and grief for his help, but Jocelyn doesn't seem particularly afraid of grieved over his son's death.

The rest of the cast of locals are either quietly threatening or eccentrically menacing, like a pair of older women who laugh at everything and anything—even when it's completely inappropriate. There's a trio of people or things in cloaks and masks who appear in the fields outside the forest and near some houses, too, but if there's any importance to who or what these figures are and why they show up just when the movie has lacked a scare attempt for a bit, it's overshadowed by the movie's bigger, predictable revelation. Cloaks and masks serve as the only identity for everyone who's still around in the story by that point.

Some of this is fine enough, if only because Middleton is believable and Ineson has such a mysterious air about him as the unwilling helper or quiet threat. There's also the foundationally dim and grim look of Lord of Misrule, which goes a decent way within the context of this pagan-based awakening nightmare—but definitely not far enough to compensate for the movie's half-cooked plot and mythology.

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