The Shout (1979)

Fantastic!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This film may not be everyone's style of horror but it is my style of horror-thriller. It's not a typical story - quite different than most all horror-thrillers I have ever seen.This movie moves along a steady pace as Crossley (Alan Bates) tells Graves (Tim Curry) the story of how he moved himself into the home and the life of a married couple. Crossley tells the story of how he is not an average person, he is fluent in aboriginal magic and works his magic to get what he wants. Crossley also claims to have learned the killer aboriginal "Shout". Is all this true or is Crossley just a patient and not a visitor at the psychiatric hospital? Watch the film to find out.Yes this movie is GOOD - I personally think this one would make a great prime time movie to watch. (Some nudity and sexual content - so if you have young children you might want to wait until they are in bed to watch the film).8.5/10

The importance of sound is known to all human societies. Sometimes it acts as an element of nuisance but there are hardly any people who would imagine it to have the tremendous potential to kill. This conundrum has been depicted in a British film called "The Shout" which has also been hailed by most media groups as a horror film. This is not entirely true as it has some good moments of fright but without usual blood and gore stuff. This is a special feature with which one is able to associate most horrors films. Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski makes effective use of the quiet life in a small English village to direct an intriguing tale of a mysterious man's ability to wreak havoc on others as he possesses the unique ability to destroy things merely by uttering a loud cry. In the film, the destruction caused works on two different levels. On the one hand there is a stranger who gains entry into a normal household through trickery. This action has fatal consequences for the inhabitants of the house. On the other hand, a different kind of insidious destruction is caused by an insider who decides to ignore her partner in order to team up with a wicked man. Watching this film, viewers would find it rather strange to digest that the fury of sound has been used by an evil character to subdue another person who is none another than a sound engineer. Before the making of this film no other motion picture had dared to describe in detail the deadly possibilities of sound to create destruction. This is an element which gives "The Shout" a certain level of advantage over other horror films.

The Shout is the kind of 70's horror film I love, where the grip on reality is tenuous at best, where things may or may not be what we see them to be and life as we know it is broken by something that may or may not be of this world, the normal and the everyday become concave and something dark and ominous can be faintly discerned at the bottom, and conclusions are not governed by logic and finality but rather erupt in wild emotion, guilt or pain or insanity, emotion masked/transfigured using supernatural terms. In some ways the notes Skolimowski uses to tell his story are the same as those used in Don't Look Now and The Last Wave, the basic means of expression are aesthetic, some of it even strike the same chords and capture the same atonal melody as those films, but in the end it's not quite the same tune.This is a story recounted to a third party during a baseball match in a mental institution, "always the same story" as the teller says, the sequence of events is not always in the same order, and we can only guess at how many times Crossley has said his story, how much of it is real or not and if any of it actually happened as we see. The flashback story where Alan Bates shows up in John Hurt's home to threaten his grip on sanity and his marriage is pretty straightforward though, it's like a fable about cuckolding come to pass with supernatural means.Susannah York is perfect for this type of film, she has the right measure of youthful and gauche that makes her distraught heroines seem so natural (like they do in Images and Freud), and she shines again here, although now it's John Hurt's turn to be confounded by the shattered reality around him and put the pieces back together.The scenes where he tries to pretend that everything is fine when he knows it's not, with that fragile forced smile and his fleeting movements, resonate with me in very immediate ways, his eyes always tell the truth though, and there's a scene right after he witnesses "the shout" for the first time where he's lying in bed visibly shaken and we hear Alan Bates going up the stairs coming to his room and his body tenses and clenches in anticipation. He doesn't want to be in the same room with that man but he must pretend everything is okay because he can't explain any of his terror to anyone, and he's even powerless to make him leave. Terrific acting by Hurt, I like him more every time.That we go back to the mental institution to realize we've been listening to an unreliable narrator takes out some of my enjoyment of the film, because things have just got interesting and they could be pushed much further, before a curious voodoo involving a round rock and shoes can take place and the police make their appearance, and because it's a device used in a plethora of films dating as far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Skolimowski is obviously not trying to make one of that plethora of films. In other words, whereas Don't Look Now takes time to blur the line between right and wrong, real and imagined, The Shout goes back and erases the line so that none of what we saw may have actually been real so that nothing really matters. It's like a game where the stakes are removed at the last minute.The last minute is amazing though, whatever it's supposed to mean, it's wild and chaotic, thunders strike, people flail naked in the rain, and someone's jaws are clenched in agony.It's still very good stuff, anxiety and uncertainty always work better for me than literal horror, and The Shout for the most part is like a strange painted round object someone has brought back from an exotic place, I like to take it in my hand and look at it from different angles and make up stories about it, but it loses some of that mysterious charm when I find out that it's nothing more than a painted round rock. It still could have been used for anything by the one who made it but that unspoken meaningfulness of it has evaporated a little.

Shout, The (1978)*** (out of 4) If a movie could win an Oscar for pure strangeness then this thing here would have swept just about every major award. The film tells the story of a newlywed couple (Susannah York, John Hurt) who move into a small house in the English country only to then have their lives taken over by a man (Alan Bates) who claims to have just returned from learning Aboriginal magic, which gives him the ability to kill by shouting. The thought of a movie being about a man who can kill simply by shouting would seem like a very stupid idea but it actually works here. This thing has been labeled and sold as a horror film but I think a lot of horror fans might be disappointed because there are very few elements of the genre. I think fans of art-house films are going to be the ones who really eat this thing up. There's very little that actually happens here as we're introduced to the three characters and slowly learn things about each one. There's nothing too flashy or outlandish, instead we're just given brief details that will eventually make up an entire story. Director Skolimowski does a masterful job at taking his time with all the material and really letting the atmosphere and mode carry everything. Again, the film doesn't rush anything but instead just lays back and lets everything slowly unravel itself. The mysterious of the drifter are never really explained and I'm sure each viewer could take away different things about what's really going on. The movie is very subjective and allows you to try and make up your own mind about what's going on. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, never spells anything out for you and instead leaves many allusions that most might not pick up on. You've got a very weird triangle as the drifter slowly starts to take over the happy couple and we get a couple rather bizarre sex scenes that are mixed in with some even more bizarre "shout" scenes. I think the three lead actors are all terrific and really help make this movie as magical as it is. York really stands out as she's certainly caught in the middle of these two men and their madness. Bates has always manages to do wonders with these weird characters and you can't help but believe everything he's saying and doing here. The supporting cast includes a very young Tim Curry from THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. This certainly isn't a movie that everyone is going to enjoy due to how slow it is and how it really doesn't lay everything out for you. There are a couple beautiful scenes including one where we see Bates "shout" and then Hurt goes rolling down a cliff. The way this was shot is terrific and is one of many highlights in this forgotten gem.