Terence Davies (The Deep Blue Sea; Distant Voices, Still Lives) has been called “Britain’s greatest living filmmaker” (J. Hoberman, New York Review of Books, 2012). Based on the classic 1932 Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song is a passion project that took Davies fifteen years to complete. The strong-minded heroine Chris Guthrie (model Deyn, in a revelatory performance that confirms Davies’s skill with actresses) survives the brutal regime of her father (Mullan) to inherit the family farm, only to see the shadow of World War I fall over her happy marriage to a local lad (Kevin Guthrie). The story bears some resemblance to the recent Far From the Madding Crowd, but Davies’s film is both tougher and more deeply lyrical, with breathtaking pastoral cinematography (filmed in 65mm) that, as one critic noted, “out-Malicks Malick.”

Rated R for sexuality, nudity and some violence
Digital Presentation
Running Time: 135 minutes