The Shout

A film set in Devon, England. Cricket is being played at a mental hospital. One of the two men keeping score is a patient. Crossley is the narrator. He says he will tell a story and also says he changes it a little each time. The story goes like this: a musician and his wife live in a house by the coast. Anthony makes experimental music. He records objects, works the sounds on tape, and goes to the church to play the organ. One day a man stops him on the road. Crossley asks for food and comes to the house. He stays. He says he lived in Australia for eighteen years. He learned something there. He can make a shout. A sound that kills whoever hears it. Anthony does not believe it. He asks for proof. A demonstration is held on the beach. He plugs his ears and Crossley shouts. From there the film is a story of takeover. Crossley occupies more and more of the house and something forms between him and the wife. There is a stone. He says the soul lives in a stone and that breaking the stone kills the person. What the narrative is interested in is not magic but the narrator: its idea is that the whole thing is a story told by a patient, and how much of it to believe is never resolved. The sound design is at the centre. The narrative builds tension not with images but with sound, and the shout is a technically constructed section. The source is Robert Graves's story. Tony Banks and Michael Rutherford worked on the music. Jerzy Skolimowski showed the film at Cannes and won the Grand Prix of the jury. Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt, Robert Stephens and Tim Curry are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes strange British cinema of the 1970s and unreliable narrators. Who it is not for: anyone expecting explanation; the film resolves nothing and its ending is deliberately unsettled.