The Shout (1978)

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The Shout (1978) – J. Skolimowski

Cryptic, in the way that most films that seek to portray the more mystical aspects of Aboriginal culture seem to be.  Jerzy Skolimowski’s third British feature (after Deep End, 1970, and a failed Nabokov attempt) starts with a framing device – a cricket match at a mental hospital where Alan Bates recounts a fanciful tale to Tim Curry while they are keeping score.  As it turns out, Bates is a trickster figure in his own story where John Hurt and Susannah York play the protagonists, a couple living in a rural oceanside village who seem to be enjoying an idyllic lifestyle (aside from the fact that Hurt may be cheating).  Bates shows up after a church service (Hurt, an avant-garde composer, is the organist) and engages the unwilling Hurt in meta-physical discussion, subsequently following him home.  It turns out that Bates spent 18 years in an Indigenous community in the Outback (Australia) and has learned some spiritual magic, including how to release a shout that will kill all living things in a several km radius.  He carries a number of bones with him (and may use them to inflict punishment on his enemies) and he possesses the power to usurp another man’s wife (in this case, York).  As with Peter Weir’s films that engage with this culture (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave), viewers may feel that there are ellipses in the story – something is elusive, a key to the mystery that occurs outside of what we see on the screen.  Here, Hurt does manage to vanquish Bates by smashing a rock – but the return to the framing story leaves things open-ended (Was Bates determined to be mentally ill and is he really? Is the story true? Has Aboriginal magic been used against him in the end? What the hell has happened in the end?).