[Film Review] Sacrilege (2021)

Four friends (of the “pretty young women” variety) take a few days break in the countryside. They don’t all get along brilliantly, but they’re rallying round one of their number in particular: the man who assaulted her has just finished his time in prison. Everyone is afraid of something, though, and these four friends’ fears are unwittingly exposed when they attend a pagan festival near their holiday cottage.

That’s essentially the set-up for Sacrilege, the feature debut of writer-director David Creed. He has assembled a very serviceable cast and reliable horror tropes, demonstrating that he knows his chosen genre. It’s clearly a low-budget film, the first that has come out of its ambitious production company. The budget didn’t get in their way, though: choosing to use a stuntman set on fire instead of CGI paid off well, and some of the other special effects were surprisingly well done. I have big respect too for the efforts made in the festival scenes, which utilised a robot camera dolly and a five-camera set-up, as well as sixty local residents as extras.

Something tells me Creed came to make this film as a fan of 80s horror staples, but chose to tone down that style somewhat. Sacrilege isn’t as cheesy as, say, Night of the Demons (1988), but there are moments when that tang wafts through the screen at me. Tamaryn Payne, Emily Wyatt, Naomi Willow and Sian Abrahams may not be brilliant actors, but at least they don’t over-act like so many horror stars used to; well, except perhaps in a couple of scenes when they had to scream at their fears come to life. (It was just a big dog!) They all got to show off their bodies (or at least their tight and shiny jogging outfits) once or twice, but they aren’t dwelt on as much as the bodies were in films like Return of the Living Dead (1985). Even the sex scene avoids being terribly lecherous, but goes down the willowy-sheets-and-romantic-music route instead.

So what’s wrong with Sacrilege? Well the tone, for a start: sure, it gives a slight nod to earlier genre styles and tropes, but so slight that it’s impossible to know what is intended by it. If there was a little more of the tongue-in-cheek humour that fans of 80s horror might expect, then the film could have been quite a bit more fun. Granted, there was one death scene that made me cackle with laughter, but that so stood out from the rest of the film that I can’t help feeling I wasn’t supposed to laugh.

The bigger issue (for me, anyway), with or without the humour, was the writing. The four women have very little to distinguish them in their character or style, bar a simple motif each; for example, one is dealing with trauma, one is obsessed with her appearance. Neither the cult they run into, led by Father Saxon (Ian Champion), nor its goddess are given any context or back story; they easily look like a copy of any other folk horror crowd. Even the device of individual fears coming back to haunt the women is given no rationale at all. I might forgive any of that if the film featured any actual sacrilege.

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