The Severed Sun (2024)
Directed & Written by Dean Puckett
Starring Emma Appleton, Jodhi May, Toby Stephens, Barney Harris, Lewis Gribben, James Swanton, & Oliver Maltman.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SPOILERS!!!
Turn your eyes away, or be blinded by the spoiling light.

Similar to Witte Wieven at Fantastic Fest 2024, Dean Puckett’s The Severed Sun is another tale of patriarchal obsession and religious control, though it takes place in an indeterminate time that’s much closer to our contemporary lives than the former film’s medieval setting. Puckett’s story takes place in a small, isolated religious community run by the Pastor (Toby Stephens) where his daughter Magpie (Emma Appleton) lives with her family. Things aren’t what you’d call happy, especially not for Magpie, whose abusive husband beats his sons and her, too. Nobody stops it, no matter how many times Magpie and the boys turn up at church, week after week, full of bruises and traumatised. When Magpie’s had enough she takes matters into her own hands and dispatches her husband. Some in the community believe she’s guilty of murder, even guilty of consorting with the Devil. When another bad man dies soon after, the community turns on Magpie, and she has very few people on whom to rely. So she turns to other, darker sources of protection.

The Severed Sun, unlike Witte Wieven, doesn’t involve any established mythology or legends in any particular culture, and, instead, Puckett crafts his own unique, folklorish tale of how when vulnerable people are left without anyone to turn to, they turn to whatever will save them. Magpie’s years of living under her father’s religious vice grip, and living in a community that cares more about religion’s traditions and rules than the flesh and blood people actually living in it, drive her to find solace in all the things that their faith believes is wrong, whether it’s sex, or vengeance against horrible men, or a kinship with the shadows. Puckett’s film is, most of all, about a community that feels threatened by the differing values of some of its members, all the while the true threat is the one posed by the community itself that threatens the lives, love, and happiness of those members who don’t fit into Christianity’s brutal, rigid system.
Magpie sits at odds with her father’s religious control and the patriarchal obsessions of their faith in two ways. First, she takes control of her own situation back from religion, resorting to murder as a last resort in a community that’s more interested in pretending her husband was a good man than reckoning with the fact that a supposedly pious man brutalised his family. Magpie’s a strong woman who defies the meek, mild, weak woman desired by Christianity. Second, she’s a sexually liberated woman whose liberation inspires others who don’t conform, like David and John. Later in the film, John tries to warp this strength and turn it back against Magpie, claiming that she led David down the supposed wrong path and played a part in his sad fate. This is pure fear since Magpie clearly refuses to conform to Christianity’s desire for a submissive and (hetero-)sexually obedient woman, and it’s stirred something not just in David but likewise in John, whose fear of a non-heteronormative sexuality is part of what dooms David. Her liberated feminism in a time and place of strict tradition affects everybody, though not negatively as John wants to believe.

Magpie has altogether rejected the Christianity of her father and her community for something else entirely, which is how the whole film opens with a speech that feels like it ought to be out of a story from Greek mythology: “In the beginning there was only the Moon, but she was lonely. Her desire for a lover became the Dawn, the Sun, the God of Light. And in the shadows lives that Other Thing; forgotten, away from the light. Their bastard child wakes from its slumber.” After the events of the film transpire, Magpie recites part of the same monologue again to bookend all the liberating terror. Throughout the film we hear several of the Pastor’s sermons, as well as his general pontification steeped in prayer. In one scene, he recites part of a vesting prayer: “Give virtue to my hands, O lord…” The Pastor prays to God, as does the rest of the community. But Magpie doesn’t pray to the shadows, nor does she seem to worship them.
Throughout The Severed Sun, Magpie’s depicted as being in kinship with the Beast that helps avenge her and the women of the village. There’s a sexuality tied to Magpie and the Beast. One woman believes she witnesses the Beast slide its dark hand between Magpie’s legs as the two twist together in pleasure. In a pivotal scene, the audience is given glimpses of a flashback featuring Magpie, along with David and John, frolicking in the night, rubbing the black mud of the earth all over themselves. As John worries that God “will judge the fornicators,” Magpie urges him to reject religion’s constraints on his life and, particularly, his sexuality: “Do you want to spend your life living a lie? . . . Listen to the shadows, they have so much to teach you.” It’s all but spelled out that David and John have, at some point, had a sexual relationship, which is what Magpie refers to when she talks about ‘a lie.’ Sadly, David suffers the consequences of John’s inability to break free from religion’s heteronormativity. John also blames Magpie for David’s fate: “You led him astray.” This is further echoed by the Pastor, who believes Magpie and David’s sexual transgressions, as well as their general disregard for Christian faith, is an existential threat to the entire community.
When the Pastor allows his daughter to be punished, referring to her as an “apostate” and having her tied up while pelted with tomatoes, he claims: “They seek to erode our values.” Sounds familiar doesn’t it? The Severed Sun is even more contemporary than it seems at first once it digs into themes that are extremely relevant to our current lives. Puckett’s story of religious control and patriarchal obsession may be set in an earlier time, but it’s very much of today. Sometimes embracing the shadows is necessary because the shadows aren’t inherently bad, they’re merely opposed to the status quo, and the shadow can be of comfort to those who cannot openly express who they are within. Magpie is every outcast individual who tries to fit into a system that doesn’t want them, and the Beast, albeit violent, is not as beastly as a system that would rather discard and even kill those who it cannot subjugate.