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16 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Underrated mystery, 5 August 2003
7/10
Author: rosscinema (rosscinema@cox.net) from Oceanside, Ca.

I haven't watched this film in probably 20 years and I had forgotten a lot of the plot but I watched it again recently and it reminded me that this was one of the most unique and interesting mysteries I have ever seen. Story starts out with a young doctor named Robert Graves (Tim Curry) who comes to an insane asylum to help keep score of a cricket match between the inmates and the staff and sitting beside Robert is a man named Crossley (Alan Bates) who starts to tell him the story of how he ended up there. Crossley was in Devon, England and meets Anthony Fielding (John Hurt) who plays the organ in church but is always experimenting with music and sounds and Crossley invites himself over for lunch. He meets Anthony's wife Rachel (Susannah York) and during lunch he tells them he spent 18 years with the aborigines in the outback and that he had killed his own children and learned some of the aborigine black magic. He spends the night but early the next morning Crossley and Anthony walk out to a secluded area because Crossley mentioned that he learned "The Shout" that can kill anything in the general area. Anthony puts wax in his ears and Crossley does his "Shout". It kills a local sheep herder and the sheep and Anthony is saved by the wax. Crossley possesses Rachels buckle from her sandal which he uses to put a spell on her to possess her as well. These scenes are shown in flashbacks and we're not sure if this is just a made-up story from a crazy man or the real deal. We know some of it is made up because we see York's character as a nurse. The film is directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and along with the Jeremy Irons film "Moonlighting" he shows good patience in the way he tells the stories in his films. This is a very effective mystery and their are lots of images that flash during the film that are cause for discussion and one that pops in my mind is that in Anthony's work room there is a photo tacked to the wall of someone or something on all fours. Later, Rachel is nude in the bedroom waiting for Crossley and she gets on all fours that mirrors the image in the photo! The performances are excellent and Bates brooding nature is put to good use here. His quiet but demanding persona is totally believable. I really enjoyed York in this film and the nudity that she is asked to do here reminded me that English actress's have an entirely different attitude toward nudity in films. York was always an excellent actress and she was very popular in the sixties and seventies and her performance here shows why. This is a film that is intended for mature audiences who are not afraid to view something that leaves some questions. This reminded me of two other films, "Don't Look Now" and "The Wicker Man" which didn't cater to a less sophisticated mindset. Well made and extremely effective.

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15 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
unusual and arty horror film involving aboriginal Australian magic; something different, 3 February 2005
7/10
Author: CryFi from Lansingburgh, New York, USA

I don't recall now how I'd heard of this movie, but having heard of it, I was motivated enough to get a copy from the Amazon UK site (region-free players are a must; region encoding should be abolished!).

From the very start of the movie, it's clear it will be unusual. First we see a woman drive up to a building. She is ushered into a room where there are three dead men, apparently naked, laid out under white sheets on what seem to be dining tables. She stops at the third one. Then, we see an black, likely aboriginal, man wandering in a desert or among sand dunes, and he approaches with a sharp bone. Then a man (Tim Curry) arrives at an asylum, where he is assigned the job of score-keeping for a game of cricket the patients and staff are about to begin. The other scorekeeper, one of the patients, starts to tell him a story....

That's a lot of jumping around just to start the film! There are layers in the film, due to the storytelling, and not everything is chronological, and perhaps not everything is even true.

The story involves the man telling the story (Alan Bates) and one of the men playing cricket (John Hurt). John Hurt's character plays organ at a church, when he gets there on time, anyway, and at home records a variety of sounds, amplifying them in such a way they sound unusual. He meets Alan Bates, a strange man who had learned some aboriginal magic when he lived in Australia, and Bates manages to enter Hurt's home and life.

The story structure and the involvement of an asylum called to mind The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for me, and now seeing the comments of others, I see I'm not alone. One other movie that came to mind while watching The Shout was Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) because of the Australian weirdness and artiness in both films.

I can't claim to understand everything in the film. For example, at one point a character wakes up and he's temporarily confused about his identity and profession, a problem that reoccurs at least once thereafter. Additionally, there's some digging in the sand for rocks which seem related to people somehow. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this to a degree (I like some mystery sometimes), I enjoyed the movie, and I'm glad I bought it.

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13 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :-
A brilliant puzzle of a movie. Original and haunting., 20 September 2002
Author: Infofreak from Perth, Australia

'The Shout' is one of the most underrated thrillers of the 70s, and should be spoken of in the same breath as the much more celebrated 'Don't Look Now' and 'The Wicker Man'. All three put complex and original adult approaches to the supernatural thriller genre. Alan Bates ('Whistle Down The Wind') really shines in this movie as the mysterious and charismatic stranger cum shaman Crossley, who turns a comfortably bohemian middle class marriage upside down. The couple are played by John Hurt ('The Elephant Man') and Susannah York ('Superman'), and they are both first rate, as is Tim Curry ('Rocky Horror') in a smaller but important supporting role. But as good as they all are this is Bates' movie all the way in an unforgettable performance. A haunting, dreamlike puzzle of a movie that improves with multiple viewings. Highly recommended!

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9 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Etherial, dreamy and well made tale of the bizarre., 30 August 1999
9/10
Author: simon-118 from London

Halliwell described this as a "well made and acted but ultimately rather pointless fable" which is typical of his style of reviewing, but despite his glib conclusions one must agree that this is an excellent piece of avant-garde film-making that, in spite of its impressive cast, often strikes one as more like a short by a new director. In fact, the film may have been more effective as a short were it not that the sleepy pace lends it a dream-like and ethereal feel that is totally shattered when the shout is heard. The Shout itself is so built up that one can only expect disappointment. Yet when it finally is heard it is truly horrific and you will jump out of your seat. The scene on the sand dunes as Alan Bates yells out death to all around him and sheep are swept down dead by the cry is masterful. Similarly effective is the soundtrack by Genesis' Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, mainly based around reworkings of themes from Banks' album "A Curious Feeling" a gorgeously nostalgic sequence of music that is inventively brought into the film as a low-key presence, faintly playing in the background as if echoing on the breeze, and used by John Hurt on the church organ. The man from nowhere character Alan Bates presents is fascinating and a nice change of style for him, and it seems strange how rarely this film is aired on television and how hard it is to locate on video, despite its excellent cast and original realisation. A little known but fascinating tale of the uncanny presented like an adult fairy tale.

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Fragments of sound, 11 February 2007
8/10
Author: PeteMcD (pm010w8854@blueyonder.co.uk) from Dundee, Scotland

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

A stranger - a dark, brooding Mephistopheles - enters your home. You don't invite him, yet you don't stop him: his sly charm almost offers him free rein. He eats Sunday dinner with you and your wife and recounts the eighteen years he has spent with an Aboriginal tribe. He tells you both, with indifference, that he has slaughtered each of his children only days after they were born – an accepted ritual. He offers tales of men slicing themselves open and "shedding their skins like snakes".

Later, he takes you aside and tells you, in the bluntest tones, that he has developed a shout - an ear-shattering roar - that kills all who are subjected to it. How do you react? Do you shirk away, cower at his supernatural awe? Or does the sceptic inside - that Western secular pragmatism - feel challenged by such nonsense? Do you actually want to... hear... it? This is the dilemma that gnaws away at John Hurt's cynical musician in Skolimowski's astonishing film. A philanderer and complacent snob, the values and lazy morals of Hurt's rural Devonshire life and marriage are being undermined, and he feels compelled to object.

The conflict leads to a scene (involving the eponymous bellow) of such dreadful power that it will tear at the deepest of your primal instincts. It's like those closing few minutes of The Wicker Man with the rawness factor turned up to eleven. Once you have recovered from it, you remind yourself there is still half a film to watch...

Thankfully, The Shout is far more than just one fantastic scene. An insidious, creepy and surreal study of duality, madness and faith - how deeply opposed forces struggle, torment, destroy one another - it probes and disturbs in the same ways all the great horror films of the 70s do.

Its closest sibling is perhaps Nic Roeg's feted Don't Look Now. Both films are preoccupied with the dissolution of a relationship and of a mind – Don't Look Now, how tragedy can scar irreparably; The Shout, how malaise can breed insecurity. Both films offer a familiar setting through alien eyes – Don't Look Now, the handsome streets and canals of Venice are reimagined as chilly, Gothic mazes; The Shout, the twee pastoral village is juxtaposed with the exotica of swirling sand dunes. Chaos lurks.

The three central performances are consistently impressive. Leaving empty spaces, the actors resist the urge to indulge. Hurt charts his character's descent convincingly, never likable, yet still evoking sympathy. His wife is played strongly by Susannah Yorke. Meanwhile, Alan Bates, as the stranger, offers authority, wisdom and moral rectitude remarkably effectively for one of the most wicked men committed to celluloid. He picks at the hypocrisies of the couple's life like a scab.

Skolimowski is not a director I have heard much about. I want to know more. A Pole who endured the barbarity of Nazi occupation (his father, a member of the Polish Resistance, was executed by them), it may be trite to psychoanalyse, but hard to deny this is a film borne of knowing what arbitrary cruelty is and how it can unravel us all. It is of no surprise he has worked with that other Polish dark master, Roman Polanski.

The film is shot with the inquisitive eye of an outsider. There is beauty to be found in those steady, expansive pans of cliffs and dunes, but the tangible foreign quality adds a layer of unease and distrust. Often, characters are left on the other side of doors and windows. The filmmaker feels an outcast, a voyeur, and, by extension, so do we.

The soundtrack, fittingly, is unlike anything you've ever heard. Hurt's character tapes effects in his home and we are treated to a positive miasma of reverbs. Never has the simple act of smoking a cigarette sounded so menacing. There is a woozy rhythm to the editing also, capturing the haphazard feeling of shifting times and realities. The main story is framed within another of a cricket game at an asylum, and one never escapes the possibility it could all be the deluded reverie of a madman.

The Shout will not appeal to all. Its very nature - fragmented, downbeat, open-ended - perhaps explains its relative obscurity. Nevertheless, Skolimowski displays a rare and admirable contrariness and it is a work I would thoroughly recommend... an absurdist's journey into the sound of terror.

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Hypnotic but confusing story which is suddenly made clear in that last scene., 4 May 1999
10/10
Author: Aldanoli from Ukiah, California

Something strange is going on at the cricket match: Alan Bates tells Tim Curry a story about Bates' relationship with a musician (John Hurt) and the musician's wife (Susannah York)and about Bates' supposed ability to "shout" a man to death . . . is Bates re-telling a true story or making things up as he goes along? This movie has perhaps one of the most extraordinary endings on film: the disconnected and confusing events that have been swirling past suddenly fuse, and become understandable, in the wordless final scene (you have to have been paying attention, though). Kudos to Bates, Hurt, York, and director Jerzy Skolimowski for a hypnotic tale that unfolds partly like a mystery, partly like an anacrostic-and which feels all the more satisfying once you've worked your way through it.

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6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
An eccentric, but curiously compelling tale, 27 July 2000
10/10
Author: Afracious from England

This is a strange film about a sinister man named Crossley (Alan Bates) who invades the lives of a man (John Hurt) and his wife (Susannah York) in a sleepy English town. He tells the story to a fellow scorer at a cricket match (Tim Curry), and we are left to try and disentangle it.

Crossley tells the couple that he spent eighteen years in the Australian outback, and that he killed his children when they were born. He also tells them he met a magical man in the outback, who taught him how to shout to kill. The scene when Crossley 'shouts' on the sand dunes is good. The shout kills sheep, birds and a shepherd. The sound is good too. The film was made in Dolby system sound, which is rare for that time. During the 'shout' the effect is impressive. The ending is rather weird. Alan Bates is good as the creepy Crossley. It's an odd film, that is curiously compelling to watch.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Shouting, 19 October 2006
10/10
Author: VideoKidVsTheVoid from Springdale, Arkansas

An utterly bewitching and fantastical film from the great Polish-born filmmaker Jerzy Skolimoski. An "abnormal" mental patient, Crossley (Alan Bates), tells a story of himself, which may or may not be true, to a young, confused looking Tim Curry during a mental institution run cricket match. He tells of how he self-imposed his way into the home of an experimental musique concrète composer, Anthony (John Hurt), who records all sorts of fascinating sounds and noises and then manipulates them with his mini-studio of electronic equipment, and his wife Rachel (Susannah York). Inside the flashback/flash forward/flash sideways, he tells them of a unique ability he has perfected, which he learned from an aboriginal medicine man while living in the Australian outback. It seems he can perform a shout that will kill anyone within a surrounding radius. He demonstrates "The Shout" to Anthony and unknowingly kills a local farmer. His presence in Anthony's home quickly becomes awkward and unwanted but he continues to force his stay with intimidation. He uses magic to entrance Rachel into becoming almost rabid for him, and taunts Anthony with his conquest and powers. Anthony, humiliated and overpowered in his own home and life, searches desperately for a way to defeat Crossley; searches for the source of his "soul".

Skolimowski uses the music and sounds that are recorded by John Hurt's character on screen (in real life made by Rupert Hine) as the metaphysical soul to this cinematic nightmare; similar in the ways David Lynch uses sound design as both an audio and visually integral mood stabilizing component in his nightmare-dream poems, or how Nicolas Roeg uses fractured time and images to a disorientating, hypnotic effect. In fact, it feels very analogous to a Roeg film. Highly recommended.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
the whisper, 6 August 2000
Author: jplenton from cardiff, wales

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

02/08/00

Due to the success of The Exorcist and The Omen there was an upsurge in supernatural based films in the seventies. Most relied on the Christian belief system with tales of priests battling The Devil. I know of two exceptions. Firstly The Manitou, a messy film based on Red Indian belief. Secondly this film, The Shout, which relies on Aboriginal belief. From this preamble you may ascertain that The Shout is a horror film. Only in a loose sense, it is more of a dark and mysterious drama.

The film opens (and ends) at a mental institution. The scene could be construed as a microcosm of `stereotypical' English life, with the rural backdrop, cricket on the Green, and brief thundershower. A visitor is told a strange story by one of the patients based on his past. This story is the focus of the film (cf. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

The patient imposes himself on a young couple living near a rural village. He claims to have lived in the Australian Outback for eighteen years and has become an Aboriginal magician. He has the power to enact a `terror shout', which kills anyone within earshot. He is met with initial scepticism and humour by the couple, especially the husband; Anthony played by John Hurt (typecast as the everyman victim/underdog).

The appearance of a stranger or newcomer (in this film the patient/storyteller) is a familiar premise in film. The newcomer acts as a catalyst for change, gradually exposing the hidden `underbelly'/underlying tensions and secrets of the family or community visited. Cf. Knife in the Water, Cul De Sac, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Vampyr, The Witches (1966), and that's only mentioning films I have seen this year.

*spoilers*

The stranger's choice of `victim' could be because Anthony is having an affair. Note introductory dialogue `that man had a wife who loved him'. The stranger leaves for a period, but as the affair resumes, promptly returns. Perhaps the story is in Anthony's imagination, brought on by guilt.

Another theme is religious belief. The initial conversations between the stranger and Anthony are on Christian theology. The topic is not continued as the onus shifts to belief in the magician's power. Anthony can only seek retribution by believing absolutely, he too becomes a magician, but this costs him his `mind'. Note how both `magicians' end up in the asylum. Anyone with unorthodox or unwanted beliefs is hidden away.

Are the magician's powers real or fantasy? He is telling the story remember and openly admits to changing it on whim. The ending chaos could be part of the story or delusion. The film leaves behind a lot of loose strings and unanswered questions. It is up to the listener/viewer to decide.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
scandalously under-rated, 8 March 2006
9/10
Author: shmekel from Australia

And I really do mean 9/10. This film is a superbly made, wonderfully acted, deliberately under-stated fantasy masterpiece. The sense of conviction, of the truth being portrayed even when the paranormal erupts into the world, is unnerving. Yes, the film as a whole is unapologetically high-brow, full of cultural allusions that many will miss (The dry psychoanalytic cracks, the Francis Bacon-inspired compositions, the inversion of Orpheus), but all that can happily be missed without in any way detracting from the film. For those who love metaphysics, the incredible thrill of the possibility of magic, this should not be missed. (The current DVD release, MOST Regrettably, has been sub-optimally re-mixed. However, for those new to the film, it shouldn't matter too much. For those who have, turn that shout up loud!!!)

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