When Scottish teacher James Findlay’s (Euan Douglas) estranged mother (Nancy Joy Page) dies, she leaves him her first communication for decades. She writes him that she doesn’t want him to ever return to his childhood home because it was there where he had some kind of break-down as a child, and it is because of this break-down their estrangement happened.
Not surprisingly, this kind of ambiguous message only makes James curious about the parts of his own past he doesn’t remember, not to speak of finding the reasons for his breakdown; he also has dreams that might be fragments of memories, or something calling to him. So James decides to move into the huge, beautiful and creepy house in the highlands for a while, to jumpstart his memory, explain the things about himself he doesn’t understand, and perhaps come to terms with his broken down relationship to his parents.
Once he’s at the house, James’s dreams become stronger, stranger, and more disturbing, and what’s worse, the borders between dreams and reality begin to shift, until James can’t quite be sure anymore about what’s real and what’s not. Still, he keeps on investigating the house. James’s only help is the eccentric American Evie (Lexy Hulme) who is living in the refurbished barn. The very lonely man falls for Evie very quickly, leaving him with reasons to stay at the house even once his dreams – visions? – and parts of his reality become dominated by something that looks like an owl-headed man with peculiarly long arms, something that clearly doesn’t have anything good for James in mind.
Lawrie Brewster’s Scottish indie horror film Lord of Tears is really quite the thing, mixing elements of Celtic and biblical myth, folkloric horror (the urban legends/creepypasta this might be influenced by are folklore too), cosmic horror, and psychological horror into something very much its own, and doing so with style, imagination and vision.
From time to time, but only very seldom, you can see the film straining against what must have been a miniscule budget. Two or three dialogue scenes – particularly those between James and his best friend Allen (Jamie Gordon Scott) – are a bit awkward in direction and acting (despite the acting quality in general being quite high), the ghost make-up isn’t very convincing, and the film’s final twist just doesn’t work at all, but these things, even the botched ending, don’t really matter compared to the very many things Brewster – as well as Sarah Daly’s script – does right.
As everyone who knows me knows, I’m a sucker for new imaginary mythologies, and I generally find the films using them much more interesting than those recycling ye old vampire and zombie stuff (unless those films make these classics/clichés truly their own, which does happen) and the same old rules. Lord of Tears’s mythology is particularly fine, lovingly fitted in the cracks between real world myths, just detailed enough to make it feel believable yet not so much it loses the frisson of the weird and the virtues of ambiguity.
This kind of horror is often not the sort that makes much use of gore and instead puts all its efforts into creating mood, the feeling of dread, and dream-like ambiguity, and the film at hand is no exception to this. Brewster makes spectacular use of his locations, doing that nearly proverbial thing where landscape turns into one of the most important characters of a film. The bleak beauty of the Scottish highlands and the incredible building that is supposed to be James’s childhood home establish the protagonists’ experiences as taking place at the border of reality and dream.
Brewster further emphasises this mood of the unreal with some rather spectacular editing of a kind you seldom see in indie horror at all, with a use of montage that often borders on the avantgarde. This way, the audience can be sure about the reality of anything that happens as little as James can, a – it turns out – rather disquieting state of mind. Obviously, Lord of Tears is a film utterly unafraid of making mental states visible by breaking the sense of realism cinema is often so careful to build, even risking losing its audience by going into directions that only later in the film will turn out to be meaningful and important for the film instead of the whimsical indulgences they at first appear to be. This sort of thing is difficult to do well, yet Lord of Tears does it in more ways than one and with a fearlessness I found particularly impressing. Under normal circumstances, you just don’t do a scene like Lexy’s dance in a horror film, yet Lord of Tears does, making a frightening scene much later that much more effective and meaningful. Which is, of course, another quite remarkable thing – that the film’s weirdness does at all times connect very directly with the story it tells and the characters living through it, beyond the vague connections of mood many of my beloved continental horror films from the 70s settled for.
Lord of Tears really is a lovely film all around, and while it’s not perfect, I think everyone with a heart for everything capital-w weird, or horror films going their own, very individual, ways, should see it.