malcolmgsw I note that the budget for this film was five million pounds which was an awfully high budget for a British feature.I also note that the copyright owners were the National Film Trustees,in other words public funding had been utilised to make this pile of rubbish.I saw this film when it was released and the only redeeming features I noted were the cricket match and the fact that the film only runs for 86minutes.One can only assume that a recognised director managed to power through his vision.Probably working on the basis that the more abstract and indecipherable it is the more it will be lauded.Certainly one of the worst films I have seen on Talking Pictures.

TheLittleSongbird Reminding me of the likes of the original Wicker Man in terms of style, The Shout is an unusual but very atmospheric film. While the story is compelling and very well-paced, there are some parts where it meanders slightly at the end where the film felt a little strange in its tone. Also the film is a little too short, I think the reason why the story meandered was to do with the attempt to wrap everything up before it was too late. And in regards to the DVD, the audio could've I agree been much better, it sounds a bit murky making some of the dialogue hard to hear That said, The Shout works in its atmosphere. The many moments that work are incredibly haunting, and the shout itself stuck in my mind for weeks. The Shout also looks very stylish, the scenery and costumes are wonderful, the lighting is appropriately bleak and the cinematography and editing add to the atmosphere without looking too slip-shod. The direction is very adroit and the dialogue is thought-provoking and very rarely over-the-top. The performances also help elevate. Alan Bates is brilliant, both John Hurt and Susannah York are perfect and Tim Curry is very effective in a smaller role.All in all, atmospheric and well done. 7/10 Bethany Cox

chaos-rampant 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.

shmekel And I really do mean 9/10. This film is a superbly made, wonderfully acted, deliberately under-stated fantasy masterpiece. The sense of conviction, of the truth being portrayed even when the paranormal erupts into the world, is unnerving. Yes, the film as a whole is unapologetically high-brow, full of cultural allusions that many will miss (The dry psychoanalytic cracks, the Francis Bacon-inspired compositions, the inversion of Orpheus), but all that can happily be missed without in any way detracting from the film. For those who love metaphysics, the incredible thrill of the possibility of magic, this should not be missed. (The current DVD release, MOST Regrettably, has been sub-optimally re-mixed. However, for those new to the film, it shouldn't matter too much. For those who have, turn that shout up loud!!!)