The subject of a cult following, ironic because the film itself is about a pagan cult, The Wicker Man is actually as good as its reputation. Made in 1972, but not released until a year later, the picture is sui generis -- it's remarkable, extremely entertaining, and one of a kind. Many horror films build slowly to an unsettling "reveal". The Wicker Man is all "reveal" -- within about ten minutes, the audience is shown enough bizarre imagery to account for a half-dozen horror movies and the steady accumulation of startling events continues right up to the film's famous fiery climax. Most astonishing is the picture's matter-of-fact tone -- here British understatement creates a mood somewhere between Monty Python and a totally deranged crime thriller. The picture is cheaply made, using local players, and the camera-work is just serviceable -- there's no dark shadows: everything occurs in overlit rooms and sunny meadows. The film is disturbing, in fact, because it makes no effort to create a spooky atmosphere -- strange events simply occur as if they were totally natural. Ari Aster's Midsommar clearly owes an enormous debt to the bright, direct horror imagery pioneered in this picture directed by Robin Hardy. (The film has a fantastically witty script by Anthony Schaffer). An example of the Monty Python style grotesquerie is an early scene in which the hapless copper, Howie, invades a room where a dozen teenage girls are sitting at desks under the tutelage of a beautiful blonde teacher. The teacher asks the girls: "What does the Maypole mean? What does it symbolize?" One of the girls stutters and seems embarrassed to answer. The teacher is annoyed. "You all know," she says. "The Maypole is the phallus. It represents the penis." The girls all sagely nod their heads. Howie, of course, is unutterably alarmed. He calls the attractive blonde school teacher aside: "Why are you telling them this?" "It's our way," she says. Indeed.
At the film's opening, we see Howie piloting a one-man sea-plane over some gorgeous if desolate islands. It's the coast of Scotland and Howie has been summoned to Sommerisle, a craggy island a few miles from the mainland. A child has gone missing and Howie's mission is to investigate her disappearance. Upon landing his sea-plane in the harbor of the village, the locals immediately suggest that he leave. Everyone seems to know about the missing girl, but no one is willing to admit that they even recognize the picture that he shows them. Everything on the island is strange --there are candy shops that seem to feature confectionary shaped like corpses, dead girl cakes, apparently, and, even the missing girl's mother seems to not care too much about her daughter. Another daughter draws a hare, possibly dead, and says that this represents Rowan, the girl who has vanished. Howie is a devout Christian and, although he has a fiancee, he has been saving sexual relations for marriage. On his first night in the village, he checks into an inn and all the barflies sing a bawdy song offering him sex with "the landlord's daughter." This is followed by an amazing scene in which the "landlord's daughter", played by Britt Eklund dances naked in her room and tries to lure Howie into her bed -- he resists temptation but just barely. May Day is approaching and the villagers are erecting a large Maypole. Howie is taken by cart to Lord Sommerisle's castle, a forbidding manor with chalk-grey walls and brooding battlements. Lord Sommerisle is played by Christopher Lee, dressed in a vulgar tartan suit and very tall -- he looms over everyone. Sommerisle says that the island is a sort of experiment. His grandfather came to the place to plant fruit orchards -- there's apparently a warm current that washes the island's rocky shores. (The place has seaside gardens of roses with palm trees -- it looks very much like the island featured in Joanna Hogg's excellent Archipelago, a film that strangely enough exploits some of the imagery in The Wicker Man, for instance, the sea-planes and the exotic palms growing on the coastal promenade, although to a completely different effect.) Sommerisle's grandfather was a libertine and he encouraged the islanders to abandon Christianity for some kind of Celtic pagan nature worship. The Christian church has been abandoned and the islanders all seem to subscribe to a species of pantheism that periodically requires human sacrifices -- at least, when the apple harvest fails. And we know that the apple harvest has recently been abysmal. Sommerisle's weird matter-of-fact account of the history of the island is accompanied by images of stark naked girls jumping over a bonfire in a sort of Stonehenge temple. Sommerisle says that the girls are trying to get pregnant by the fire-god. Everything in the picture is clearly shown but off-kilter. For instance, the plot is driven by musical numbers -- old folk songs, for instance, a tune about getting pregnant by fire, are performed one after another both on the sound-track and also by people singing and playing instruments on-screen. (In some ways the film suggests a musical gone mad.) All evidence points to the notion that Rowan has been made a human sacrifice. And all the sinister locals suggest that Howie get out of Dodge before May Day when there will be a general orgy. Howie defiantly continues his efforts to find the girl and, in fact, searches many of the homes and shops on the island -- he finds lots of very strange stuff in people's houses, including a casket with a dead crone with her hand, apparently, cut off. Later, when Howie takes a nap, he wakes up to find the crone's amputated member burning with flames at each finger-tip, a "Hand of Glory." By this time, the May Day festivities are in full flourish -- a man in a big tub-like costume with a dragon head wanders around town and everyone is wearing grotesque animal masks. Howie puts on the costume of a Pierrot or Punch figure, a kind of hideous harlequin and he marches with the townsfolk out to the seaside where the pagans apparently plan to sacrifice the girl. Rowan appears at the mouth of a cave and Howie, shedding his mask, rescues the girl and flees through the hillside, emerging on a cliff above the sea. The townsfolk are all gathered on that barren hill and they seize Howie. Here it is revealed that Rowan was merely bait to lure to the island "a virgin Fool who is a Man of the Law" -- in other words, the true objective of the scheme has always been to sacrifice, not the girl, but Howie, a more suitable offering to the pagan Sun God. Howie is dragged into a forty-foot high effigy of a man made from wicker. The towering wicker giant is filled with sacrificial beasts -- geese and ducks and some pigs. Led by Lord Sommerisle, the pagans light the wicker man on fire, first congratulating Howie on becoming a true martyr for his faith. As the pigs and geese scream in the fire, Howie prays to the Christian God. He's enveloped in fire and the wicker giant's head falls down into the inferno, the camera shooting through the smoke into the red orb of the sun setting over the sea.
The film is very funny, although the ending is more than a little disturbing. In one shop, Howie finds a large jar full of foreskins, neatly labeled to that effect. When a little girl has a sore throat, the doctor puts a living toad in the child's mouth. Removing the toad, the doctor cheerily says -- "now the toad has your sore throat." Lee's Lord Sommerisle is smarmy, like a garishly dressed used car salesman, although in the final scene, his face painted stark white and his long hair black and stringy, he's an alarming apparition. When Howie flees the bawdy song at the Inn ("the Green Man"), he ventures onto a beach where a dozen couples are having sex by the sea. Entering a deconsecrated graveyard to look for Rowan's grave, he encounters a woman nursing a child, seated on a tomb. The film is full of small shocks on this order. It's pretty much a perfect horror film, filled with disturbing imagery, and, yet, extremely funny. This is a cult picture that is as good as people say it is. An amusing touch is a proto-Coen Brothers title at the outset of the film (somewhat like the claim in Fargo that everything you see really happened) -- here the film's director thanks "The People of Sommerisle for sharing with the filmmakers their religious customs."
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