The Cinematheque

“For Davies, period is something to be seen in the round, like character, with its paradoxes intact … As a reflection of how the winds of the Somme reached a distant home front, Sunset Song is bettered only by Maurice Pialat’s 1971 television miniseries La Maison des bois.”

Nick Pinkerton, Artforum

Terence Davies’s final film adaptation of a novel was the most strenuous project of his career to realize. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is what many consider Scotland’s national book, often assigned in schools for its colloquial language and unflinching depiction of a woman’s coming of age. Chris (Agyness Deyn) is at the stage where she is ​“neither bairn nor woman.” She lives through books and words, which allow her to articulate (in voiceover) her dissatisfaction with rural life in early 20th-century Aberdeenshire. Davies’s film is seemingly placid, evoking the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi, but the plot relentlessly closes in on Chris; before she has the chance to understand her own desires, she is forced into impossible, traditional roles. The claustrophobia and tragedy of life is cut against images of Chris in contemplative repose amidst the Scottish landscape. As emphasis, Davies made the decision to shoot Sunset Song​’s interiors digitally and its grand exteriors on 65mm.

Advisory: Sunset Song contains scenes of sexual violence.

“A piercing lament … Even when working from source material crafted by others, Davies, like all singular filmmakers, imprints it with his DNA.”

Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

“There is no such thing as a ​‘minor’ Terence Davies [film] … I was woefully unprepared for the film’s devastating final passages, wherein the camera returns to the same florid panoramas from before, now granted a breathtaking sorrow and majesty that risks turning the film’s soft-nationalist bent utterly inside out.”

Steve Macfarlane, Cinema Scope