Film Forum

From the acclaimed British director of THE DEEP BLUE SEA, THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, and DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES comes an epic story of early 20th century rural life. SUNSET SONG stars rising actress Agyness Deyn as a spirited young woman struggling between tradition and change on her family farm in Northern Scotland on the cusp of World War I. Excelling at school and possessing a burgeoning independent streak, Chris (Deyn) seems destined to become a teacher. But family life has its own pull and her tyrannical father (Peter Mullan) exerts a formidable force on his brood, as well as on her mother whose body he treats as both refuge and battleground. As the constellation of her family shifts around her and romance comes calling, Chris grows into womanhood just as the war begins to devastate a generation. Unflinching, yet deeply romantic at its core, Davies’s lushly shot adaptation of the 1932 classic novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon is given power by the director’s poetic realism.

2015 • 135 MINS. • MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Reviews

“CRITIC’S PICK! A luminous vision. Immerses you in the intoxicating beauty of the natural world. A vision of the sublime. Rhapsodic. A sustained, moving reflection on the human life cycle. A bittersweet awareness of the fragility of beauty.”
– Stephen Holden, The New York Times
Read the full review here.  

“This mighty drama of emotional archeology… deepens the director Terence Davies’s career-long obsession with memory and its blend of the intimate with the historical. Frankly sensual and glowingly lyrical images that compress grand-scale melodrama into the quietly burning point of a single soul.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Makes your heart leap with surprise. Impeccable direction. There is light, not just glowing but palpable, in the Caravaggio effects of cinematographer Michael McDonough. The ultimate wonder of SUNSET SONG is that Deyn never seems to notice herself posing, nor does she ever stoop to acting.”
– Stuart Klawans, The Nation

“Majestic. An exceptional performance (by) Agyness Deyn.  At once solemn and lusty. (Deyn and Will Guthrie) generate tremendous electricity, the erotic spell Chris and Ewan fall under never in question. Even when working from source material crafted by others, Davies, like all singular filmmakers, imprints it with his DNA.”
– Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

“Stirring and gorgeous. A ballad of love and heartbreak sung with passion. Almost painfully beautiful. (The) landscape cinematography is rapturous. The sheer visual grandeur sweeps you along, and Gibbons’s central themes – forgiveness, human endurance, nature – hold it all together”
– Tom Huddleston, Time Out New York 

“Grade A. Gorgeous. Stunning. Vividly captures the bittersweet beauty of life on earth. A film that demands to be seen. Likely to evoke awe. It accumulates an immensely tender beauty that fills up your heart like water rising in a well during a rainstorm. So powerful…because it captures the fragility of any cherished past.”
– David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“A glowing tone poem…with rhapsodic attention to details of sound, light and shadow. A romantic symphony.”
– Ella Taylor, NPR