Lord of Misrule (2023)

*Lord of Misrule* has a problem unusual for folk horror: it is far too eager to prove that it is folk horror.

Before we have properly met the village, the film is already dealing out horned skulls, corn-dolly shapes, ritual objects, church bells, fields and pagan-looking paraphernalia. Then comes the harvest festival, with Morris dancers, bonfires, children dressed as woodland creatures and the distinctly alarming Gallowgog. It doesn't so much plant clues as arrange them neatly on the village green and ring a bell.

Which is frustrating, because buried inside all that signalling is a much better idea.

The village festival feels strangely *practised*. When the Lord of Misrule strikes his staff, the villagers fall silent immediately. The costumes aren't charming bits of annual amateur theatrics either. They look maintained, inherited and taken seriously. What initially seems slightly too slick for a rural knees-up becomes considerably more interesting once we realise these people aren't playing at tradition. Tradition is what they do.

That could have made Rebecca, the newly arrived vicar, a terrific outsider through whom to discover the village. Even the locals calling her and her husband “Mrs Vicar” and “Mr Vicar” carries the faint suggestion that everybody already knows where the newcomers sit in the hierarchy.

Instead, *Lord of Misrule* repeatedly explains what it might have allowed us to uncover. Once Rebecca's daughter disappears, we should be sharing her mounting panic while gradually discovering how completely the village has closed around her. But her desperation never quite reaches the level the situation demands, while her husband is so thinly written that his involvement sometimes seems almost optional. Police complicity, older rituals and intriguing supernatural details arrive, but too often as information rather than revelation.

Ralph Ineson gives the village's mythology some genuine weight, and there are images here that stick: bloody eggs, the half-seen figures waiting in the fields, the strange passage into another version of the landscape. The trouble is that the film keeps introducing fascinating things just after it has finished explaining something else.

There is a good folk-horror story inside *Lord of Misrule*, about Christianity sitting uneasily atop something older, and a community for whom revivalist folklore may have become something dangerously real. We just wish the film trusted us enough to find it.

Watchable, handsome and absolutely dripping with folk horror. Possibly to the point of leaving puddles.

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Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com

Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Lord of Misrule: folknhell com/lord-of-misrule-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.