THE MOOR **** UK 2023 Dir: Chris Cronin. 122 mins
The feature debut for director Chris Cronin and writer Paul Thomas is a chilly, atmospheric exploration of a community haunted by a series of past child disappearances, carrying with it unavoidable echoes of the infamous Moors murders.
It opens as it means to go on, with a low-key sense of menace and dread. In Yorkshire in 1996, young Claire and her best friend bond over Opal Fruits and Dib-Dabs while the camera lingers ominously around a seemingly empty, darkened alleyway. The boy vanishes and never returns. The title sequence captures the bigger picture: kids disappearing in broad daylight, playgrounds closed, unsuccessful search parties, the eventual conviction of the apparent perpetrator.
25 years on, the boy’s Dad (David Edward-Robertson, looking authentically like a man who hasn’t slept properly in over two decades) remains determined to find his son out on the perilous peat moors. The man blamed for the abductions is due to be released: police errors (shades of Freddy Krueger) resulted in just a single life sentence. Claire (Sophia La Porta) is now a podcaster but has publicly dodged talking about the case. No bodies have ever been found but she, the father and a dad-daughter team with apparent psychic gifts, set out to find some answers.
Cronin employs multiple formats to tell this bleak, riveting story: talking head documentary interviews with local people include Bernard Hill as regretful ex-copper Thornley and local parents conveying years of media vultures adding to their grief. There’s a Lynchian moment in which the camera briefly travels below ground: a rumbling music cue accompanying the peek at the grim undergrowth. Disquieting details emerge: locals remember how the media avoided showing the accused’s face, making him even more of a nightmare figure for those who were kids at the time.
There are echoes of the benchmark for horror films about the vanished, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT: Claire films part of their Moor trek and the final half-hour showcases the most frightening tent-based terrorisation since Myrick and Sanchez’s iconic found footage film. Mark Peachey (Alex) and Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips (Eleanor) are excellent as the dowsing duo hired by the desperate father, and their involvement leads to a startling interaction with a spirit.
Set to a nerve-jangling score by Nir Perlman, this admirably avoids naff jump scares and shifts cannily from a muted first hour (playing like a superior ITV true crime drama) to a second half foray into full-blown folk horror, complete with exhumations, a herd of eyeless sheep, Neolithic rocks and portentous dialogue. The end note manages to be both marvellously chilling and heart-breaking.
Review by Steven West