The Severed Sun begins with a voiceover signalling immediately we’ve left behind the conventional and entered fairy tale territory. From the outset, duality takes centre stage: the sun and moon, the natural and unnatural, the masculine and feminine.
The latter forms the foundation for the religious cult at the centre of this hypnotic folk horror. Men and women perform different work in a tiny community that tessellates between work and prayer. At the head sits The Pastor (Toby Stephens), father in name to all, but by blood to Magpie (Emma Appleton). Where everyone else lives in humble lodgings, the patriarch lords it over in the biggest house, preaching his particular strain of Puritan dogma about escaping a “fallen world” with an emphasis on purity and original sin. Unable to live a day longer under the thumb of her abusive husband, Magpie poisons him. In so doing, she releases a supernatural beast — or perhaps a long dormant pagan god — from the bowels of the earth. An uncanny creature seen from afar like an oil spill on screen while, up close, it’s a thing of tangled roots and sharp jagged angles. But it’s the bright glowing eyes that allure, like two suns or moons. Perhaps one of each.
Juxtaposing the sublime natural images is a cold, synthetic score by Unknown Horrors. The off-kilter melodies wouldn’t be out of place on John Carpenter’s Lost Themes and serve to highlight the wrongness of this community, imposing rigid black-and-white binaries. Underpinning the majority of the runtime is a sequence of drones that morph from a dread-inducing pulse to unsettling animal sounds, subliminally conjuring the beast even when it’s not on screen.
This duality is highlighted in almost every expertly constructed shot, contrasting light and shadow. All is rendered more potent with a 1.66 aspect ratio, the same used by Robert Eggers for his dark and beguiling 2015 debut feature, The Witch (which itself can be seen as progenitor to The Severed Sun). Using 1.66 also gives the sense of looking through a window into another realm, and each frame seems that much closer, more confrontational, than letterboxed widescreen is able to accomplish. But, as with Nietzsche’s abyss, there’s a sense of the characters looking back. Many are shot glimpsing through branches or gazing directly down the lens.
Each shot has the careful and deliberate intention of any of Ingmar Bergman’s best, but the triumvirate of director (and writer) Dean Puckett, cinematographer Ian Forbes, and art directors Maisie Doherty and Millie Morris create images that at once feel pulled from dreamland and also leap vividly from the screen. There’s an undeniable sense of European arthouse, but The Severed Sun is a British beast through and through with a clear lineage to The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General and Hammer Horror (it’s a testament to the strength of the central performances that things never become camp).
Rural Cornwall, where the whole film was shot, becomes a mythic place, with only a few clues to hint at the modern world the cult has moved away from. The colours — consisting almost entirely of blue, grey, and green — are vibrant without resorting to cranking up the saturation, and an absence of any artificial light gives the film its naturalistic quality. So, while it was shot digitally, several sequences come close to the warmth of real film. This makes the judicious use of night vision even more startling, conjuring a sense of found footage (2014’s Apocalyptic in particular) and a deranged, druggy eroticism.
That The Severed Sun exists at all is a minor miracle and testament to the tenacity and vision of its writer-director. It was developed with assistance from BBC Film and part funded by the BFI and Arts Council England, not to mention the cooperation of various Cornish organisations. Combined, it proves the strange, sublime, woodsy, gothic folk that Britain built is very much alive and well.
It’s easy to fall under its spell and while there are plenty of easy comparisons to be made — and that’s to say nothing of the debt it owes The Crucible — The Severed Sun is very much its own entity. The central theme of abusive men being the real beasts might be on the nose for some. But what great fairy tale doesn’t make its intention plain whilst mesmerising you with enchanting images, or the possibility that when you next step foot into the woods, you too might encounter a beast?
DISTRIBUTOR
Blue Finch
DIRECTOR
Dean Puckett
SCREENPLAY
Dean Puckett
CAST
Emma Appleton
Toby Stephens
Jodhi May
DIGITAL
6 October 2025
