Review of The Wicker Man (1973) by Ms. Southern L — 11 Aug 2010

Five stars really aren't enough for this film which is brilliant on every level. Almost a musical, The Wicker Man seethes with an intangible, unnamable horror that renders every object on this small Scottish island into an eerie symbol pointing towards the underlying struggle between theological viewpoints of the universe.

Pagan versus Christian, Nature versus Civilization, Magic versus Reason, Monotheism versus Pantheism/Polytheism, promiscuity versus Victorian sexuality, Sin versus repression--all come into conflict over the course of the film.

Hardy summons all these conflicts together into a startling mixture that assaults the eyes and ears with its beautiful and terrible images and its haunting soundtrack. Ultimately, The Wicker Man is profoundly Nietzschean exploration of ethics, religion, and identity, for it concerns the oppsotion between Apollo and Dionysus, between active and reactive forces--it creates a plane in which these forces are brought into direct and mortal combat.

The Wicker Man strives to enact its own genealogy of morals by reaching beyond good and evil, and it does so with a joy indicative of Nietzsche's own celebratory philosophical destruction. No doubt, the "pagans" are not entirely flawless in the film, but Hardy depicts Howie's character in a manner that is fundamentally unlikable--he is religious and faithful to the degree of seeming dead and static.

He exists on a level of pure being with no ability to open himself up to the experience of becoming. He is what is worst in religion--the instantiation of crushing guilt that debilitates the individual to the point where life is never a joy but merely a series of temptations to be avoided, and Howie avoids them even when he undergoes physical suffering as a consequence.

Of course, on a cheesy and simplistic level, The Wicker Man seems to be an early 70s reflection upon the conflict between the free love of the hippies and puritanical laws of the social majority. But it reaches much deeper than that into the fundamental questions of ethics and identity.

Hilarious, disturbing, erotic, and haunting, The Wicker Man is truly one of the great masterpieces of horror cinema and ranks among some of the greatest films ever made.