Those interested in the concept of rewilding, a form of environmental conservation that seeks to restore land to a more natural state as popularised by the book by Isabella Tree, should be well advised that this film has nothing to do with that. Rather, it is an almost endearingly amateurish package, written and directed by Ric Rawlins, that is an exercise in something that’s almost as fashionable these days: folk horror. There’s lashings of folk horror about these days, some of it, like Enys Men, very good. Rewilding, however, is not very good, if we are being honest. But it’s as folky as you get, telling three disconnected stories set in the West Country and Wales revolving around such folky elements as spooky coastal caves, trees that might once have been men, and Wicker Man-esque rituals in tiny villages. Plus, there’s ersatz folk music on its soundtrack (some of it written by Rawlins himself), folk acting (as in really, really poor acting by non-professionals), and even folk editing and folk cinematography, which elevate inexperience and poor craftsmanship into an aesthetic in itself. The whole thing is very outsider cinema.
Rewilding could be fun if it were either a little more inept or a little more competent, but instead it’s a bit of a chore. The first story, Stone Mothers, finds an unlucky archaeologist (John Matthews) investigating reports of the devil inside a sea cave accessible only at low tide. It gets bonus points for well-researched locations, but you have to take those back for having a protagonist so dim he never thinks to make a note of the tides, or even just install a handy app. The Family Tree finds a writer (Natasha Neckles) booking an Airbnb in a village so she can write about local trees, and finding one that bleeds and has human eyes looking through bore holes – at least, in her dreams.
The final chapter, The Writers Enquiry, lacks correct punctuation in its title and any sense of logic in its ending, but at least lead Richard Chivers is a semi-competent performer, howling with energetic, almost-believable terror in the last minutes. His character is supposed to be a local reporter trying to gather ghost stories in a picturesque village for a paper that’s about to go bust. Really, hasn’t local journalism suffered enough already?
• Rewilding is available on now on Prime Video.
