Previous commentators have remarked upon the similarity of the framing story of this film (that reunites the author and star of 'I Claudius') to 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'; but no one yet seems to have noticed the resemblance to Pasolini's 'Teorema', in which Terence Stamp rocks the boat of a bourgeois household with a similar mystical droit du seigneur to that exercised by Alan Bates over a youthful John Hurt's luscious wife Susannah York (who at one point has a remarkably feral nude scene on all fours), despite his unkempt appearance and army greatcoat that recall Davies from 'The Caretaker' more than Bates' earlier saturnine romantic leads. Most reviewers seem also to be taking this tall tale of bucolic rumpy pumpy with more of a straight face than it's actual makers may have been. But it clearly needs to be seen (and listened to) more than once.

Like a long day on the beach... with a psychopath. Not one scene shot in the dark, I think. It's always morning or lunchtime. Natural light and natural expressions on the faces of churchgoers. The film refuses to fall into that horror cliché of scary things happening at night. Beautifully shot and edited, almost like a music video, which makes sense because the story is about the sound. The scenes of experiments with sound effects seem like performance/installation pieces from an era when conceptual art made sense. The banality of the story is avoided because... it's just a story from a loony bin. The whole film is a flashback. The characters seen during the cricket match may or may not be husband and wife, the story could be just a figment of lunatic's imagination. The horror is in the mind and becomes a fascination. The cast is superb and as natural as the light. Nudity was not an issue for such acting talents back then. It was just natural.

The backdrop to this startling tale is that bastion of English civility: the cricket match. Going to the wicket here are the staff and inmates at a mental asylum. Keeping score is a young intern and Crossley (Alan Bates) a man whose needs are special and very possibly insane. During the course of the game he describes to his fellow scorer how his life have come to such a pass. He claims to have been living amongst Aborigines for eighteen years, and to have learned to kill by shouting. In flashback we are taken to Devon where he takes up with a young rural couple (John Hurt and Susannah York) who are sceptical of this and most of his other scary stories. Unsurprisingly considering that, as narrators go, they don't come much more unreliable than mental patients.Thematically this is similar to The Wicker Man with its challenge to Christian beliefs, though it's much more layered and with less of a narrative thrust. Bates gives a performance of great power, rather then the quietly smouldering persona we are used to. Hurt and York are both excellent, particularly the latter as she succumbs to the madman's charms. Director Jerzy Skilomoski's takes Robert Graves' story at face value and introduces an east European art-film aesthetic into what could have been a Hammer horror. Like much of the best of 'British' - Withnail and I, The Ruling Class, Summer of Love and Skilomoski's own Deep End - The Shout benefits greatly from an outsider's perspective.

An early scene in The Shout (based on the short story of the same name by Robert Graves) shows a cricket match getting underway in a small English village. One of the scorers, Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) tells a story of a musician/sound effects artist (John Hurt) from the local village, who is unfaithful to his wife. Along comes a stranger (Alan Bates again) who invites himself to lunch at the married couple's house and tells them of his time in Australia living with an aboriginal tribe, during which time he claims to have perfected a shout that has the power to kill anything nearby. Eventually he is given an opportunity to prove it.This is a strange horror film. It tells its story subtly and not necessarily always in the order the events occurred. This approach could be part of the reason The Shout isn't at all well-known, despite its good qualities.Rich in symbolism and open to interpretation, this film drew me in and by the end I was both satisfied with the story that had been told but also left wanting. A second viewing helped me piece together a few more plot strands such as the significance of certain objects such as bones and a lost belt buckle, but also left me with a few more unanswered questions.From reading some other people's thoughts on The Shout, it seems to get compared to films such as Don't Look Now, The Wicker Man and Picnic at Hanging Rock. While I don't think it's quite as good as any of those, I would recommend it to fans of those titles. It fits into the mould of the more artsy genre films of the 70s, where the storytelling is complex and (in this case) rewards the discerning viewers attention.