Two young “Robin Hood” YouTubers inveigle their way into a rural film shoot, but get more than they bargained for…
I do everything I can to guarantee a paranormal-free life – staying off the moors, avoiding sailing ships docking in Whitby, and did I say I stay off the moors – but I do have a thing for our homegrown demonic druids. It’s good to know our pagan forebears, who dragged giant stones hundreds of miles for no reason, haven’t been put off by we 21st century snowflakes, and are still keen to pop back and say hi even if it is to sacrifice us to a rowan tree or chuck us in a bog.
FoHoCom (that’s folk horror comedy) – chilly and a little too close for comfort, leavened with a hearty dose of sarcasm – has become a British indie film staple, thanks to our myriad local ghouls and stumbly woods.
Now indie outfit Fizz and Ginger Films (writer/director/producer Matt Butler-Hart and actor/writer/producer Tori Butler-Hart) have made their own creepy contribution, including yes, a demonic druid, though anyone who watched their earlier works (ghostly siren song The Isle, lockdown scifi Infinitum: Subject Unknown) will notice that new found-footage film Dagr also sees them return to the idea of the porous walls of different worlds bumping up against each other.
That, and iPhones: filming the soon-to-be-found footage, filming the filming of the found footage and filming the finding of the footage, with characters’ focus on Apple screens – did it even happen if it’s not in your camera roll? – meaning they miss the dangers around them.
With Dagr coming in at a mere 77 minutes, this is short and shriek; part demonic, comic delight and part concise, claustrophobic nightmare, with spot-on comic “types” to (temporarily) lighten the atmosphere.
Tori is playing, well, Tori, a filmmaker directing a beautiful-looking advert for an ugly high end clothes range in an ugly pink country house in deepest Wales. She’s very funny, as movie-Tori badly explains her vision to her cameraman Gray (Graham Butler) and assistant Hattie (Hattie Chapman) who aren’t entirely sure whether they can do what they think she’s on about, so do that bemused nodding thing, while the Toris of the world just think “phew! My unique artistic vision explained! Let us proceed to create magic!”
This is Blair Witch meets AbFab, as found footage collides with fashion darlings giving overpriced clothes the Jean-Luc Goddard treatment. Though actually the filmmakers’ initial opponents are Lou and Thea: wannabe modern day Robin Hoods and wannabe YouTube stars, they create “content” that mostly involves stealing from businesses they disapprove of and giving the proceeds to the poor.
Lou (Riz Moritz) and Thea (Ellie Duckles, who looks unsettlingly like a young Sara Cox) are adorable and supremely confident, if breathtakingly naive, and by the end of Dagr I felt their YouTube series “They deserve it and if they don’t f*** it anyway!” should be renamed “F*** around and find out”. I loved their honesty and artlessness though, hiding behind video emojis then complaining it’s a shame as no one knows how pretty they are; it contrasts with the contrived awful artfulness of the advert and its creators.
And Moritz and Duckles are (sorry) absolutely fabulous; sounding, to steal a word from Gen Z, thoroughly authentic, their naturalistic chitchat relaxed and witty, as they track down the shoot in the Welsh countryside.
Back at the ugly pink country house, Tori is filming her advert in black and white, which miraculously changes the clothes from frumpy to elegant, while her models – the superior Emma (Emma King) and Matt Barber’s initially gormless Matt – decide to explain their own unique artistic vision.
This is meant to be Lou and Thea’s biggest heist: faking it as the caterers at Tori’s shoot, then stealing all the “stuff” to sell and give the money away. When they arrive at the UPH it’s deserted, though there is a scattering of bird feathers and a sense of silent menace that sadly, as is the horror film way, they simply do not notice.
All the actors involved in the advert use their own first names, less a conceit than again questioning the solidity of the barriers between what’s real and what’s made up, particularly the increasingly creepy iPad footage Thea and Lou find as they investigate the deserted house. Is it the advert rushes? More performance? A prank? The supernatural?
The first half is funny and unsettling, the second half unsettling and horrific. Though an expositionary device in the attic doesn’t really work; and, while I probably wasn’t meant to laugh, anyone falling out of a country house window and thudding onto the driveway is only going to remind us all of poor Lady Fanny Button in Ghosts nowadays.
For all Thea and Lou’s authentic chitchat, the Butler-Harts also look to be questioning how authenticity in film is cannibalised: Tori selling expensive clothes on the back of her black-and-white homage to Goddard, film school graduates Thea and Lou having to satisfy their sanctimonious yet greedy audience by not only giving away their haul but also by faking the tension to create their content.
Like the Butler-Harts’ last film Infinitum: Subject Unknown, repeated images dissolve into the screen lines of a broken connection. Bad connections drive the horror. While governments’ inability to provide comprehensive rural mobile phone coverage is bad news for locals, it’s been a gift for British indie horror filmmakers, as it means it’s perfectly feasible that anyone being stalked by a demon finds they have literally no phone signal, even in 2024.
And as iPhones are waved about on stubby selfie sticks in the haunted woods, like a protective talisman of modernity, their uselessness against a dead druid is also horribly funny.
Dagr has a limited cinema release in the UK from 7 February. The film will be available on digital in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand on 2 April, followed by the UK and Ireland on 8 April 2024.
Watch the trailer for Dagr now and scroll down for images from the film: