THE SHOUT

The Shout is a visually elegant and often oblique psychodrama with a dash of surrealism and the supernatural. The film, which takes place at a cricket match on the lush grounds of an insane asylum where some of the players are inmates, relates in flashback the story of a married couple, Anthony and Rachel Fielding, whose quiet, sedate life in the Devon countryside is interrupted by the arrival of a strange man named Crossley. He invites himself to lunch one day and then stays on to dominate the couple through occult powers he has acquired while living with an aboriginal tribe in Australia. The narrator of the bizarre tale is none other than Crossley himself. After more than a decade of middling success, Jerzy Skolimowski surprised everyone with The Shout; it won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes. An independent film, The Shout was distinguished by an intelligent, literate script by Skolimowski and Michael Austin, which at times exudes the sinister atmosphere of a Harold Pinter play. It also sports an avant-garde music score composed by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford (two members of the rock group Genesis), and an impeccable cast headed by Alan Bates, who is appropriately intense and menacing as Crossley. (Jeff Stafford)