By Matt Harries
With the weather in this country finally starting to resemble the heat and humidity of last year, summer, it seems, is finally well underway. Swiftly following on from the critically-praised Midsommar is a second piece of folk-horror for these warmer months. But while Ari Aster’s film is replete with the fertile imagery of flowers and feasts and white-clad maidens dancing in the Scandinavian sunlight, William McGregor’s Gwen utilises a very different, rather unseasonal atmosphere. Set among the beautiful yet austere mountains of Snowdonia in Wales during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the landscape is heavy with a brooding sense of foreboding, which culminates in the stark narrative of this gothic-toned production.
Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) is a girl still, not quite yet a woman. As the oldest daughter she is both the main support to her struggling mother Elen (Maxine Peake) and friend and playmate to her young sister Mari. Although tender in years, for Gwen adulthood looms large, in the form of her duties upon the small farm she tends with her mother. With the father away at war – his return hoped for, but without any recent contact a seemingly distant prospect – life is a daily struggle. The times she plays with Mari offer brief moments to enjoy some vestige of a carefree childhood, but these are as scarce as the reward for their long hours of toil upon the cold and muddy slopes of the Snowdonian hills.
Where once the valley they resided in was home to three families and their small flocks of sheep and humble crops of vegetables, the recent death of the Griffith family – struck down by cholera – means Gwen, her sister and mother are all that remains of the farming community in those hills. Much of the surrounding populace are now employed in the mining of the distinctive grey slate that is such a common sight in Snowdonia to this day. The mining industry is the true source of wealth in this part of the world, and with the guaranteed work in factories as well luring more and more people from subsistence on the land, Elen and her family increasingly seem to be regarded as outsiders by their own community. Under pressure from the glowering Mr Wynne (played by who else but Mark Lewis Jones), who repeatedly attempts to buy the farm to give the land over to industry, the beleaguered Elen is struck down by illness. Despite the well-meaning advice of the mine-employed doctor, for young Gwen there is no question of leaving their home – they simply must keep the farm running ready for her father’s return.
With Elen weak from illness and exhibiting increasingly erratic behaviour, and with the twin threats of Mr Wynne and failing crops, it is no wonder Gwen often wakes in fear of an intruder, or suffers vivid nightmares. Increasingly it seems as though there may be a malign presence out there in the windswept darkness.
Where Midsommer focused on a vibrant community, engaged in bright and colourful fertility rituals with no small amount of social cohesion, Gwen is concerned with a very different scenario. Always beneath the stare of icy peaks, surrounded by windswept expanses of cold grass and black rock; with a shroud of dark cloud that seems to hover just above the hills; this is an oppressive landscape that serves only to heighten the sense of an imminent catastrophe. People seem sullen and indifferent to Gwen and her family’s situation, even as she takes the farm’s meagre produce to market and battles to uphold the duties of her bedridden mother. The more we see of Mr Wynne, the more likely it seems that he and his thugs are prepared to go beyond verbal offers to secure the farm. Gwen is old enough to see what happened to the Griffiths and read into the nature of her mother’s hushed but heated conversations with Mr Wynne. Is some agency, human or otherwise, working to destroy her family? Are her nightmares prophetic, or merely the product of a child’s imagination?
Director William McGregor has made a name for himself by employing Britain’s rural landscapes as a hallmark of his work, and in Gwen his appreciation of the power of the Welsh mountains as a storytelling device is obvious. There are numerous lingering shots of the dark-hued valleys, whether of the small house Gwen and her family live in, set against dark sky, or the horizontal lines carved across the landscape by the slate miners, who themselves appear indistinguishable and industrious as ants as they go about their labour. Often these shots are silent apart from the sound of the wind. To once again draw comparison with Midsommar, Ari Aster’s preference for strident use of the film’s score is in direct contrast to the style of McGregor. Often he uses silence, rather than sound, in a way that draws the senses further into the scene, inviting us to search for meaning written in the landscape. A sense of mystery soon to be unveiled, indeed possibly hidden among the details of the physical geography, pervades throughout.
For all that we are impressed by Gwen’s maturity and determination to keep her family home, it is hard not to be concerned for her plight, so tightly do the hills and clouds encircle her, so unrelenting is the air of gloom that lies upon them all. Indeed, this film works well on two levels – a gothic tale of haunted landscapes and memories and also as a piece of social history, documenting a time of huge change across Britain as the industrial era saw a shift away from a rural life toward one centred around the factory and the mine. Certainly, there is a sense of inevitability that infuses proceedings. Gwen’s family is caught between the immovable object of the mountains and the weather, and the unstoppable force of change that swept over Wales and elsewhere during the 19th century.
For all its historical context, it is the human component that resonates most strongly and the central performances are key to this. Gwen herself is beautifully played by Eleanor Worthington-Cox, who manages to demonstrate the character’s vulnerability, toughness, resolve and fearfulness all at once. Forced to grow up before her time, to work the land and care for her ailing mother as well as her young sister, she elicits both our sympathy and our admiration. Elen, looking like a woman worn thin by her own battles, serves as a warning to Gwen, a reminder of what the forces seemingly aligned against them can do to someone over the years. Maxine Peake brings both a sense of frailty and of ferocity to the character of Gwen’s mother, a woman who, despite her debilitating illness, lights up with an inner fire in defence of her daughters and their home. Elsewhere Mark Lewis Jones delivers his stock-in-trade performance as Mr Wynne and Kobna Holbrook-Smith offers a small yet much needed element of humanity as Doctor Wren.
Beautifully shot and sympathetically told, Gwen is a stark, sometimes chilling tale of life at a time when folklore and tradition were being swept aside by the forces of socio-economic change, but for all that the land is sometimes cruel and seemingly haunted by dark spirits, perhaps in fact it is man himself who stalks the valleys; who is monstrous of deed and the true agent of misfortune.
Gwen (2018) was released on 19th July 2019 (UK).