Director – William Brent Bell, Screenplay – Tom De Ville, Producers – William Brent Bell, Nick Bower, Alison Brister, Laurie Cook, Deepak Nayar, Jason Newark & James Tomlinson, Photography – Simon Rowling, Music – Brett Detar, Visual Effects – Koala FX (Supervisors – Artem Isaakian & Menalaos Pampoukidis), Special Effects Supervisor – Sean Harland, Production Design – Alison Butler. Production Company – Riverstone Pictures/Bigscope/The Machine Room/Rep 12.
Cast
Tuppence Middleton (Reverend Rebecca Holland), Ralph Ineson (Jocelyn Abney), Matt Stokoe (Henry Holland), Evie Templeton (Gracie Holland), Alexa Goodall (Bryony Furleigh), Jane Wood (Ida Tremlow), Rosalind March (Miri Tremlow), David Langham (D.I. Hythe), Anton Valensi (George Furleigh), Sally Plumb (Marjorie Garfoot), George Keeler (Henry Garfoot)
Plot
Rebecca Holland has accepted a position as the vicar in a small English country village. The locals are preparing for the harvest festival. That night during the celebrations around the bonfire, Rebecca sees her daughter Gracie being led away by a costumed figure of the horned deity the locals call Gallowgog. The police are called but Gracie cannot be found. Rebecca believes that the locals are being evasive and that they have taken Gracie as sacrifice to Gallowgog.
Director William Brent Bell has become a genre regular ever since his second film, the ridiculous videogame horror Stay Alive (2006). From there, Bell went on to the reasonable success of the Found Footage exorcism film The Devil Inside (2012), followed by the werewolf film Wer (2013), The Boy (2016) and its sequel Brahms: The Boy II (2020) about a sinister doll, the ghost story Separation (2021) and Orphan: First Kill (2022).
On the other hand, when you see an unimaginative, middle-of-the-road director like William Brent Bell having latched onto Folk Horror, you know that the genre has gone mainstream and become tediously respectable. The plot of Lord of Misrule rehashes elements familiar to the genre, in particular the basics of The Wicker Man – the Christian protagonist in a small community discovering that the locals adhere to the Old Ways; the missing girl who seems to be earmarked for sacrifice at the harvest festival; and the wall of denials and gaslightings from the Sinister Small Town locals whenever she tries to get answers to questions.
Tuppence Middleton (c) searches for her missing daughter
The more that Lord of Misrule goes on, the more tiresome it becomes in the use of plot devices that the Folk Horror genre has made overly familiar. William Brent Bell directs okay, but the familiarity of the tropes being wielded make this an exercise in tedium. His use of dream jumps with ghostly appearances of the daughter are irksome.
It is only at the end that the film defies expectation. Instead of a wicker man, we get an appearance from the horned demon Gallowgog, which is an impressive looking creation. However, the ending [PLOT SPOILERS] where Tuppence Middleton returns to the villagers and become the new head of their folk religion is absurdly hard to believe. It is an ending that asks us to accept that one person who has gone so far as to take up one religion (Anglicanism) as a vocation can abruptly switch and accept the mantle of another religion within the space of five minutes.
The actual title Lord of Misrule comes from early Christendom and was the figure of a mock ruler who was appointed from among the peasant masses to rule over Christmas revelries, which often consisted of much drunkenness and carousing. The figure is dated back to at least the 5th Century A.D., although claims are made that it comes from earlier Roman traditions.
