Review: The Wicker Man: The Final Cut (2013)

Cast: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento
Director: Robin Hardy
Country: UK
Genre: Horror | Mystery | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Note: The Wicker Man: The Final Cut is now open in limited release and on DVD/Blu-Ray. For Ronan’s review of the film’s theatrical cut, see here.

One of those incredibly few efforts that truly merit the “so bad it’s good” label, Neil LaBute’s 2006 remake of The Wicker Man is a hilariously inept disaster, a baffling bastardisation of one of cinema’s greatest horrors into perhaps the finest showcase of what the internet has happily termed “Cage Rage”. Yet easy as it is to find fault with the film—and it’s very, very easy—it’s no more difficult to understand how things could go so terribly wrong in tonal terms: The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy’s 1973 masterpiece, is one of the most brilliantly balanced genre hybrids in cinema history, wonderfully working as deadpan camp comedy for its opening hour before making its sublime about-face and retrospectively rendering the amusing antics that came before in a whole new light. And all that, as if it weren’t enough, within the framework of a festive folk musical.

For much as The Wicker Man has never seemed entirely incongruous, the ordering of events from cut to cut radically redefines the movie’s integral weirdness. Adding some scenes newly re-discovered and even excising some others deemed detrimental to the flow by Hardy, this 40th anniversary edition stands, if knowingly not a “complete” presentation of the picture, the most effective harmonisation of the film’s religious overtones and overarching aura of oddity.

That LaBute’s film failed is all the more unsurprising when we consider the myriad versions of Hardy’s that have emerged through the years, each of them—with even the slightest change—upsetting that balance and amending the movie’s effect one way or another. From the originally delivered ninety-nine minutes that would later become the director’s cut to the Roger Corman-advised cut that went out as a B-movie companion to Don’t Look Now to the mid-eighties medium-length cut and any number of versions in between—multiple rights changes facilitated multiple perspectives on how the more difficult material should be presented, if at all—The Wicker Man’s varying tonal stability in each of its incarnations aptly attests the precariousness to which LaBute and his version fell prey.

The great achievement of this new “Final Cut”, extensively sought from various sources by current owners StudioCanal via an eventually successful Facebook campaign, is to expose just how unsteady those prior versions have each been. For much as The Wicker Man has never seemed entirely incongruous, the ordering of events from cut to cut radically redefines the movie’s integral weirdness. Adding some scenes newly re-discovered and even excising some others deemed detrimental to the flow by Hardy, this 40^th anniversary edition stands, if knowingly not a “complete” presentation of the picture, the most effective harmonisation of the film’s religious overtones and overarching aura of oddity. It is, most importantly of all, the most coherent and congruous construction of the central character’s slow immersion in an utterly alien culture.

It is the essence of The Wicker Man, a film whose claim to the horror label has not been without its contesters, to profoundly disturb with the last-act revisionism of its own narrative. In Hardy’s “Final Cut”, he has fundamentally anchored that enormous impact in the most structurally sound and tonally appropriate assemblage of the story yet seen.

The relative rustiness of some of the rarer footage—albeit beautifully restored to the peak of possibility in the new digital transfer—adds an eerie charm to these “lost” scenes; fans of the film who’ve long loved its peculiar charms will delight in seeing Edward Woodward’s immaculately aloof Sergeant Howie better defined, his increasingly aggressive investigation less a failing of character here, as before, than an appreciable reaction to extenuating circumstances. Better built, too, is the crucial comedy of the film, sly sight gags helping to make morbidly amusing the search for this missing girl amidst an unobliging community. Their pagan practices, explained through the integrated musical numbers that make so rhythmically hypnotic this tale, emphatically allow Hardy’s ingenious interrogation of Howie’s own—increasingly emphasised—religiousness to bear full fruit.

It is the essence of The Wicker Man, a film whose claim to the horror label has not been without its contesters, to profoundly disturb with the last-act revisionism of its own narrative. In Hardy’s “Final Cut”, he has fundamentally anchored that enormous impact in the most structurally sound and tonally appropriate assemblage of the story yet seen. This release is not remarkable for a surplus of new material as some might hope; instead, it is—above all—a filling-in of the blanks that previously made a great movie a little less so. It was never not clear to faithful fans that this is among the greatest horror films ever made; like a saviour resurrected, The Wicker Man: The Final Cut is the payoff on four decades of faith that would prove it even to the pagans.

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Ronan Doyle

Director of Movies On Demand & Sr. Staff Film Critic at Next Projection

Ronan Doyle is an Irish undergraduate film student and freelance critic, whose work has appeared on Indiewire, FilmLinc, Film Ireland, FRED Film Radio, and otherwhere. When not watching movies, reading about movies, writing about movies, or thinking about movies, he can be found talking about movies on Twitter. He is fuelled by tea and has heard of sleep, but finds the idea frightfully silly.

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