#65 - The Wicker Man
A sheriff investigating the disappearance of a young girl from a small island discovers there's a larger mystery to solve among the island's secretive, neo-pagan community.
Robin Hardy
1973
Fanaticism
United Kingdom
IMDB: 76
Metacritic: 87
RottenTomatoes: 90
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-tDnavDCwI
Streaming:
https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-wicker-man
Voter Ranks
BroncoFreak_2k3 34
Brunell4MVP 13
dickey moe 73
ilov80s 50
Scoresman 27
This was a pretty solid movie that was worth watching. On the plus side, it has that early-1970s feel, where it is going for a realistic, natural look, and it nails that look. Most of the actors look like random people pulled off the streets of an obscure Scottish island, and the location looks great too. While the story is mostly a police procedural, they throw in plenty of "WTF?" snippets that place this one clearly in the "horror" column. The big reveal at the end has been spoiled for everyone for the past 50 years, but it was still cool.
On the minus side, there is too much straight-up exposition in this movie for my liking. Christopher Lee is great, but he gets too many "Let me now pause to explain the current goings-on to the main character and, by extension, the audience" moments. The Wicker Man is obviously going to draw comparisons to an Ari Aster film that hasn't shown up yet but does a similar story better - both of Aster's best-known films go light on the exposition and let the audience figure it out. I like that approach better.
But the Aster movie isn't really about what The Wicker Man is about. The Wicker Man is about society's unease with the decline of Christianity, which was a pretty common thing to come up in the 1970s. In that respect, a better comparison is with The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby. I find the characters in those to be much more believable than the main character in Wicker Man. This guy is a bit of a cardboard cut-out, and I think that makes the movie a little too didactic.
If you like Greek drama, it's also worth noting that this movie is a loose retelling of The Bacchae. (An overly-zealous authority figure tries to stamp out a new religion featuring weird sexual practices and is killed at the hands of the cultists, with the audience realizing at the end that he was doomed from the start).
It's a great-looking film with plenty of tension and quite a few scenes that make the viewer genuinely uncomfortable. I would have ranked this had I seen it previously, probably down in the 60s or 70s. I can see myself coming back to it. (Edit: If I wrote this much about it, obviously I think it's worth seeing).