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Six went out and only one came home
For Those in Peril (2013) doesn't need to finish its sentence. Even if you aren't familiar with the hymn that supplies the title of writer-director Paul Wright's debut feature, there's nothing else with quite the elemental danger of the sea, introduced immediately in the haze-blue of a dream, then storm-churned to black and white foam on the rocks. Shot around the Scottish fishing village of Gourdon in a collage-like style as immersive and disorienting as the deep waters of memory, the film is aggressively quotidian about the realities of life contingent on the sea even as it swirls with the legends that can't help but roll up on its shore. I thought it was a realist film when I started watching it. I still think it is, but my ideas of realism include gills.
It begins like a portrait of grief. Under circumstances as mysterious and terrible as a calm sea and no traces, a fishing trawler has disappeared, taking five young men of the village with it and leaving as sole unexplained survivor the inauspicious Aaron (George MacKay). He was a misfit before the disaster; he is a Jonah now, the inconvenient reminder of good lads lost while this gawky, mute or tactless mooncalf wanders the streets and shores as blankly as if the sea has scoured him from himself and left nothing but the stray misfire of impulses and obsessions behind. He carries its color in his eyes. The stubble of acne along his jaw has a raw scaly look. Whatever he's endured—he repeats again and again that he remembers nothing—has not matured but regressed him until he looks curiously boneless, the definition washed out of the pale solid planes of his face like the waterlogged drowned. His dreadful helplessness does not make him harmless; he blunders shockingly through other people's pain. "I know you're out there, but you are wired to the fucking moon, big lad, aren't you?" He's a stunned, damaged, near-absence of a person to anchor a film to and it's an astonishing performance by MacKay, as aching as it is offputting. Perhaps it's a portrait of madness. The things that are most real to Aaron are not the blame and heartbreak of the adults in his community or the contemptuous curiosity of its children but the litany-worn sentences of a folktale he was told as a child, about "the Devil in the ocean" that swallowed up all the fish and all the children and the one boy who swam so far down after the burning red light of the monster fish that was the Devil that he turned into a fish himself and swam into its mouth and set everyone free. So he believes he'll free the men lost with the trawler, especially his heroized elder brother Michael (Jordan Young) whose home-video ghost haunts the action in tandem with clips of local news reporting on the tragedy or glitchy phone footage of cruel adolescent games. A windblown shout sends him sprinting into the water, screaming Michael's name at the late-lit waves; a small bloody fish on his doorstep almost certainly owes more to the offcuts of his mother's job than to a house call from the drowned, but he follows its lead to the tidepools where he dredges up in triumph the yellow oilskin that Michael was last seen wearing, into which he slips with the same fossil-cast comfort as he's taken to sleeping in Michael's bedroom or hanging out with Michael's fiancée, the quietly wounded Jane (Nichola Burley). Their relationship is more mutual séance than romance, but it draws its share of opprobrium: Aaron's shame extends even to his mother Cathy (the superb Kate Dickie), whose tamped-down mask of endurance cracks only during a karaoke-night performance of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," which she dedicates with soft defiance to "my boys." As grimly obvious as it is that he doesn't deserve the rumors and resentments working themselves up to the licensed violence of a scapegoat, Aaron's behavior is spiraling out of the daft and into the dangerous. He flies into a panicked rage when he can't find his brother in a one-sided game of hide-and-seek. He builds a raft out of blue plastic barrels and straps kitchen knives together into a homemade trident. Fish-masked, he traces gill-cuts over his throat and then slashes a pillow to feathers, practicing for the Devil. "I'll cut you from its belly. I will cut you out of the Devil. Only then will we be together again. Only then will Heaven return to Earth." Sunday hymn-singing trails to a halt when Aaron in his brother's filthy oilskin crashes the service, mumbling and weeping. If the Devil won't rise to the bait of a fish-gutter's ice chest, then maybe it needs something more live and kicking, like one of the boys who wasn't aboard that fatal trawler. Or maybe, if a substitute won't fetch it, it really needs the one that got away.
Classifying this movie by genre is more or less pointless, since the answer to the question of whether its realism is social or magical is yes; what it is not in either case is stylistically austere. The cinematography by Benjamin Kracun is as fidgety as its protagonist, handheld to begin with and then further cut with staticky, dreamlike vignettes in a variety of formats, Super 8 and lo-fi digital, camcorder grain and pixellated TV, always as subjective as Aaron remembering himself and his brother in the idealized saturation of childhood or whiting out during a ceilidh, overwhelmed by the slowed-down tossing of heads and hair and limbs on the dance floor as if in currents under sea. Inarticulate in person, he fills the soundtrack with a hushed, fervent address to Michael, half reverie, half prophecy, into which snippets of local voices, apparently culled from vox-pop interviews, intrude to key us in to the values and rituals of a community that has no place for a man who failed to drown: "The sea's the master and you don't take chances . . . How he can walk about and people have seen him like nothing's happened . . . He's always been so fucking soft." It's intense but not gratuitous, a tight third person from a fractured point of view; its juxtapositions are probably too logical for true surrealism, but they generate some of the same startling poetry nonetheless. It's seriously hauntological, to the point where I'm not at all surprised that Wright's follow-up seems to be the archival folk horror Arcadia (2018). But then grief does that to a person, steals the future and folds present into past until all memories lead to loss; PTSD will get you unstuck in time with or without the intervention of the Tralfamadorians. That this exploration of communal and personal trauma is all so ordinarily lovely to look at doesn't make it less difficult, or moving, or redemptively weird. Every now and then I thought that it might have been better as an extended short instead of a regular-sized feature, but then I couldn't think what to cut. It appears to be streaming in several places on the internet and there's also a DVD if you want to form an opinion yourself. I have a high bar for sea-hauntings and For Those in Peril cleared it like a salmon. This tide brought to you by my returning backers at Patreon.
It begins like a portrait of grief. Under circumstances as mysterious and terrible as a calm sea and no traces, a fishing trawler has disappeared, taking five young men of the village with it and leaving as sole unexplained survivor the inauspicious Aaron (George MacKay). He was a misfit before the disaster; he is a Jonah now, the inconvenient reminder of good lads lost while this gawky, mute or tactless mooncalf wanders the streets and shores as blankly as if the sea has scoured him from himself and left nothing but the stray misfire of impulses and obsessions behind. He carries its color in his eyes. The stubble of acne along his jaw has a raw scaly look. Whatever he's endured—he repeats again and again that he remembers nothing—has not matured but regressed him until he looks curiously boneless, the definition washed out of the pale solid planes of his face like the waterlogged drowned. His dreadful helplessness does not make him harmless; he blunders shockingly through other people's pain. "I know you're out there, but you are wired to the fucking moon, big lad, aren't you?" He's a stunned, damaged, near-absence of a person to anchor a film to and it's an astonishing performance by MacKay, as aching as it is offputting. Perhaps it's a portrait of madness. The things that are most real to Aaron are not the blame and heartbreak of the adults in his community or the contemptuous curiosity of its children but the litany-worn sentences of a folktale he was told as a child, about "the Devil in the ocean" that swallowed up all the fish and all the children and the one boy who swam so far down after the burning red light of the monster fish that was the Devil that he turned into a fish himself and swam into its mouth and set everyone free. So he believes he'll free the men lost with the trawler, especially his heroized elder brother Michael (Jordan Young) whose home-video ghost haunts the action in tandem with clips of local news reporting on the tragedy or glitchy phone footage of cruel adolescent games. A windblown shout sends him sprinting into the water, screaming Michael's name at the late-lit waves; a small bloody fish on his doorstep almost certainly owes more to the offcuts of his mother's job than to a house call from the drowned, but he follows its lead to the tidepools where he dredges up in triumph the yellow oilskin that Michael was last seen wearing, into which he slips with the same fossil-cast comfort as he's taken to sleeping in Michael's bedroom or hanging out with Michael's fiancée, the quietly wounded Jane (Nichola Burley). Their relationship is more mutual séance than romance, but it draws its share of opprobrium: Aaron's shame extends even to his mother Cathy (the superb Kate Dickie), whose tamped-down mask of endurance cracks only during a karaoke-night performance of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," which she dedicates with soft defiance to "my boys." As grimly obvious as it is that he doesn't deserve the rumors and resentments working themselves up to the licensed violence of a scapegoat, Aaron's behavior is spiraling out of the daft and into the dangerous. He flies into a panicked rage when he can't find his brother in a one-sided game of hide-and-seek. He builds a raft out of blue plastic barrels and straps kitchen knives together into a homemade trident. Fish-masked, he traces gill-cuts over his throat and then slashes a pillow to feathers, practicing for the Devil. "I'll cut you from its belly. I will cut you out of the Devil. Only then will we be together again. Only then will Heaven return to Earth." Sunday hymn-singing trails to a halt when Aaron in his brother's filthy oilskin crashes the service, mumbling and weeping. If the Devil won't rise to the bait of a fish-gutter's ice chest, then maybe it needs something more live and kicking, like one of the boys who wasn't aboard that fatal trawler. Or maybe, if a substitute won't fetch it, it really needs the one that got away.
Classifying this movie by genre is more or less pointless, since the answer to the question of whether its realism is social or magical is yes; what it is not in either case is stylistically austere. The cinematography by Benjamin Kracun is as fidgety as its protagonist, handheld to begin with and then further cut with staticky, dreamlike vignettes in a variety of formats, Super 8 and lo-fi digital, camcorder grain and pixellated TV, always as subjective as Aaron remembering himself and his brother in the idealized saturation of childhood or whiting out during a ceilidh, overwhelmed by the slowed-down tossing of heads and hair and limbs on the dance floor as if in currents under sea. Inarticulate in person, he fills the soundtrack with a hushed, fervent address to Michael, half reverie, half prophecy, into which snippets of local voices, apparently culled from vox-pop interviews, intrude to key us in to the values and rituals of a community that has no place for a man who failed to drown: "The sea's the master and you don't take chances . . . How he can walk about and people have seen him like nothing's happened . . . He's always been so fucking soft." It's intense but not gratuitous, a tight third person from a fractured point of view; its juxtapositions are probably too logical for true surrealism, but they generate some of the same startling poetry nonetheless. It's seriously hauntological, to the point where I'm not at all surprised that Wright's follow-up seems to be the archival folk horror Arcadia (2018). But then grief does that to a person, steals the future and folds present into past until all memories lead to loss; PTSD will get you unstuck in time with or without the intervention of the Tralfamadorians. That this exploration of communal and personal trauma is all so ordinarily lovely to look at doesn't make it less difficult, or moving, or redemptively weird. Every now and then I thought that it might have been better as an extended short instead of a regular-sized feature, but then I couldn't think what to cut. It appears to be streaming in several places on the internet and there's also a DVD if you want to form an opinion yourself. I have a high bar for sea-hauntings and For Those in Peril cleared it like a salmon. This tide brought to you by my returning backers at Patreon.
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Nine
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I don't believe so, but since it does play rather like the love child of Derek Jarman and Mollie Hunter, I understand why you ask.
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I loved it and I hadn't even heard of it until it turned up on Kanopy—I'm not sure it got a U.S. release. I'm trying to figure out how to get hold of Arcadia. I definitely want to see whatever narrative thing the director does next. Also I might have to rewatch The Secret of Roan Inish (1994).
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"When a boat goes down," one of the interviewed villagers says, "the families will respect the ones that's lost more than the one that comes ashore. Always the way."
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“Eternal Father Strong to Save” is the official hymn of the US Navy.
https://youtu.be/T0lRXibZUeM
- If you didn’t know that. It’s also connected to another story that you may have heard, involving a Methodist minister in Minnesota.
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I'm not sure I knew it was official, but I'm aware of its association with various armed forces as well as civilian sailors. I am almost confident I encountered it first in the text of Mollie Hunter's The Mermaid Summer (1988).
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By the bye, that is a marvelously engaging review, worthy of thumbs-up itself.
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Thank you! The film deserved it.