Rent Fanny Lye Deliver'd (2019)

Drivel - Fanny Lye Deliver'd review by PD

Starts off vaguely promisingly, but gradually reveals itself for what it is - a terribly lame, laughably bad piece that's trying very hard to take itself seriously but seems to have been created by a bunch of university film students during a weekend consisting of too much to drink and overdosing dubious substances. It's not historically interesting in the slightest, gets progressively more moronic as it goes along, and builds up to a crudely executed ending which reminded me of those Monty Python sketches involving blood spurting everywhere. Add to all of this a truly horrible and intrusive score, embarrassingly bad and truly cringe worthy sex scenes, and some of the most cliched hammy acting I've seen for years, you do wonder what on earth Peake and Dance thought they were doing. Nice costumes, but that's about it. Absolute drivel.

Sound and fury, but ultimately empty - Fanny Lye Deliver'd review by JB

A period-set sort-of psychosexual religious thriller, Fanny Lye Deliver'd has a great, of-the-moment cast (Maxine Peake; Freddie Fox and Sex Education's Tanya Reynolds, who also acts as the film's narrator) and a perennially brilliant Charles Dance, but it has a curiously quaint disposition.

Set shortly after the English Civil War in a wintery, misty, muddy and Puritan Shropshire, it's largely about what happens when a young, definitely not Puritan young couple (Fox and Reynolds) seek shelter at a law-abiding and straight laced family's farm (Peake and Dance, who live there with their young son). Needless to say, what happens is not all bibles and big hats (although the millinery on show here is scene-stealing).

Fanny Lye Deliver'd is in debt to potent 70s cinema like the Wicker Man and Straw Dogs from its melodramatic and oppressive tone, sometimes literal lashes of violence and sex, to its use of now unpopular stylistic techniques such as crash zooms. As films have obviously moved on from then, it can feel rather lurid, at times overheated, and a little self conscious.

A studied throwback nature and very watchable performances make Fanny Lye Deliver'd diverting enough, but despite an interesting religious and historical context, it's arguably a rather empty exercise in style and tone.

A midden - Fanny Lye Deliver'd review by jb

A deeply disappointing film from Thomas Clay, director of the intriguing, intelligent Soi Cowboy. Clay's stated aim was to make a 17th century Western. But in essence this is just another trot through the home invasion trope. We’re in Shropshire, just after the Civil War. Ageing, god-fearing folk John and Fanny Lye (Charles Dance and Maxine Peake) live on a smallholding with their young son Alex. Enter, naked, a young couple (Freddie Fox and Tanya Reynolds) seeking sanctuary from the law and what they say are unjust accusations of riot and lechery. We quickly discover that the pair are adherents to new-fangled ideas of liberation and self-expression, to a life of sensuality and freedom from guilt. What follows could have been a tense, claustrophobic struggle between two ways of life, two philosophies, old and new. Think ‘Performance’. Think ‘The Servant’. Think ‘Misery’, ‘Hard Candy’, ‘Funny Games’. But what we get is a muddled cartoon. Fox leers and preens to no effect. Reynolds is all sauce and skirts. The script is verbose; for the good of film, can someone please blacklist Tarantino and re-animate Harold Pinter? A swelling, lushly orchestrated score by Clay belongs to another film entirely. There are Blackadder-type antics from the lawmen. Clay has - laughably - referenced Days of Heaven and Once Upon a Time in the West but there is none of the former’s other-worldy atmosphere and none of the latter’s slow-burn dramatic pacing. The film was plagued with problems, mainly financial (three years in post-production) but the principal issue is a desperate lack of focus and intent.