One of the best horror scenes this year arrives in a documentary about French pastoralism. It\u2019s pitch-black out on a Pyrenean mountainside. Wagnerian lightning illuminates the ridges and the rain sheeting down. Bells clank in darkness as the sheep flee en masse to the other side of the col. Yves, the shepherd in charge, faces down this bewilderment, trying to perceive the threat: \u201cAre those eyes?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Shepherd and the Bear<\/a>, directed by Max Keegan, is part of a new breed of films with a heightened sympathy for country matters. Surveying the wind-ruffled pastures, lingering in battered cabins, it\u2019s a highly cinematic depiction of the conflict in the Pyrenees provoked by the reintroduction of the brown bear. Much past rural cinema made hay from insisting we beware of the locals: Deliverance\u2019s vicious hicks, The Wicker Man\u2019s wily pagans, Hot Fuzz\u2019s Barbour-jacketed cabal for the \u201cgreater good\u201d. But the new school rides with the locals like Keegan\u2019s film taps their knowledge and tells us what they\u2019ve known all along: that it\u2019s nature that\u2019s truly scary.<\/p>\n With the Ari\u00e8ge d\u00e9partement ruralists in semi-revolt against laws that stop them culling the bears, and Yves struggling to find a successor, The Shepherd and the Bear is typical of European neo-rural cinema in focusing on collisions and conflicts of tradition and modernity in the 21st-century countryside.<\/p>\n New countryside alliances \u2026 The Eight Mountains. Photograph: Alberto Novelli<\/p>\n It\u2019s a windfarm vetoed by French arrivistes that causes meltdown in Spanish Galicia in 2022\u2019s crime thriller The Beasts<\/a>, while Catalonia\u2019s peach groves are to be uprooted for solar panels in the delicate drama Alcarr\u00e0s<\/a>, from the same year. The town and country divide quietly underpinned the story of a Turin prodigal son\u2019s return to Italy\u2019s Aosta valley in the epic The Eight Mountains <\/a>(2022). And 2020 documentary The Truffle Hunters<\/a> depicted the last stand of Piedmont\u2019s geriatric mushroom men.<\/p>\n The Beasts and The Eight Mountains both deal explicitly with a growing phenomenon: the return of urbanites to the land, a cohort the French call les n\u00e9oruraux. This partly accounts for cinema\u2019s sharpened familiarity with countryside concerns, with some film-makers even personally spanning the divide. Francis Lee, who directed 2017\u2019s God\u2019s Own Country<\/a> \u2013 about a tryst between a Yorkshire sheep farmer and a Romanian labourer \u2013 grew up in that milieu. Louise Courvoisier, director of last year\u2019s tearaway cheese-making drama Holy Cow<\/a>, splits her time between film-making and working on her family\u2019s farm in the Jura region.<\/p>\n Tearaway cheesemakers \u2026 Holy Cow. Photograph: Laurent Le Crabe\/Zeitgeist Films<\/p>\n Even if neo-rural films aren\u2019t directed by countryfolk, they no longer feel like works made by hapless outsiders who would, were they in a film themselves, be liable to face the wrong end of an aggressive banjo solo. Hope Dickson Leach\u2019s The Levelling<\/a> (2017) lays out the suffocating pressures on British farmers with sobering grace; in France, 2023\u2019s Super Bourr\u00e9s<\/a> (a kind of Gallic Superbad about home-brewing teens) and Junkyard Dog<\/a> (a sort of Gallic Withnail and I about a dysfunctional friendship), show strong familiarity with the scrappy, hard-partying ennui outside the cities. Gr\u00edmur H\u00e1konarson\u2019s Rams<\/a> (2015) \u2013 which makes an Old Testament feud of a pair of sheep-farming brothers \u2013 does something similar for Iceland.<\/p>\n There have been earthy, intimate rural films in earlier decades: Peter Hall\u2019s generational village chronicle Akenfield<\/a> (1974); or Manon des Sources (1986), about Proven\u00e7al water conflicts; or B\u00e9la Tarr\u2019s S\u00e1t\u00e1ntang\u00f3<\/a> (1994), more than seven hours of unrelenting misery in the Hungarian mud. One thing that marks out the recent flurry, though, is an artisanal reverence for rural producers that, in the era of Vittles foodie culture, is quite distinct from past miserabilism. From Yves\u2019 herding in The Shepherd and the Bear, to the tomato and peach cultivators in The Beasts and Alcarr\u00e0s, and the quest for the perfect comt\u00e9 in Holy Cow, it\u2019s striking how many of the neo-rural brigade find heroism in supplying the horn of plenty.<\/p>\n The old ways still persist in some quarters \u2013 this is the countryside after all. Hoary demonisation of queer rural folk is still an easy win, cropping up lately in the scrumpy-making sociopathic child-snatchers in 2024\u2019s Speak No Evil<\/a>, or the \u201cvery country\u201d ensemble of village freaks all played by Rory Kinnear in 2022\u2019s Men<\/a>. The acceleration of folk-horror in the UK from its beginnings in the 1960s to the glut of recent years has been something to behold; the recent documentary The Last Sacrifice<\/a> explains it as the product of a particular British insularity that also puts up impenetrable hedgerows within our isles themselves \u2013 resulting in the dark fascination of the urban imagination with what lies beyond.<\/p>\n Old ways \u2026 The Last Sacrifice. Photograph: Anti-Worlds<\/p>\n It\u2019s striking that the continent produces virtually no folk-horror. Perhaps this is due to a different, less mythologised, more pragmatic relationship with the land (the UK still imports nearly half of its food, compared with 20% in France). But the tensions \u2013 whether between rural old-timers and urban wantaways, traditional methods and modern eco directives \u2013 are there.<\/p>\n And neo-rural cinema is there to witness that violence can erupt around them: in The Beasts, the enmity between worn-down locals and the idealistic newcomer leads to some very tense games of dominoes and then a sudden murder. A bear is finally shot in a neighbouring region in The Shepherd and the Bear, and Yves and other locals mutter dark approval. With such pent-up passions in the air, it\u2019s easy to see how country life begat folk-horror \u2013 but digging into the raw reality allows us to see the furrows go so much deeper.<\/p>\n The Shepherd and the Bear is released in UK cinemas on 6 February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the best horror scenes this year arrives in a documentary about French pastoralism. 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