The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford

Casting a satirical eye on the fan culture around Game of Thrones and similar big-budget fantasy shows, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford stars Peter Mullan as a tour guide and amateur historian who fights back when a blockbuster TV production takes over his sleepy Scottish hometown. The David-vs-Goliath premise is a familiar one, with echoes of Bill Forsyth’s whimsical Caledonian classic Local Hero (1983), but writer-director Seán Dunn keeps viewers guessing with his debut dramatic feature, which gear-shifts between genial farce and darker explorations of grief, depression, loneliness and psychological breakdown. Backed by BBC Scotland and MUBI, this enjoyably off-beat tragicomedy should grab further festival interest following its Rotterdam world premiere this week.

Shot in various rural locations around Edinburgh, the film’s main fictional setting is Aberloch, a picture-postcard Scottish village that enjoys a trickle of tourist trade as birthplace of the eponymous Weatherford, an early 19th century landowner, philosopher and physician. In a witty stylistic conceit, Weatherford narrates the story from beyond the grave, forever boasting of his own spurious genius while scoffing at the horrors of the modern age. Almost single-handedly keeping this obscure local legend’s reputation alive is Kenneth McKay (Mullan), a recently widowed grandfather and distant but proud descendant of Weatherford himself.

In private, Kenneth is also grieving over the death of his wife a year ago, and navigating a complicated relationship with his grown-up daughter Anna (Gayle Rankin). Already in a fragile mental state, he is pushed to breaking point when Aberloch becomes a filming location for a swashbuckling TV fantasy epic called The White Stag of Emberfell. On top of irritation with day-to-day disruption around the shoot, Kenneth is mortified when the dusty local visitor centre where he works ditches its Weatherford exhibits to cash in on the show, luring an influx of young fans who trample all over his beloved local landmarks.

Driven to desperate extremes, Kenneth resolves to make his own low-budget documentary about Weatherford, recruiting amateur wildlife cameraman Simon (Cameron Fulton) as his shambolic sidekick. He even tries to cast Oscar Sorenson (Jacob Oftebro), haughty young star of The White Stag of Emberfell, for his doomed project. When this plan inevitably unravels, simmering resentment turns to vengeful rage. Meanwhile, Kenneth is increasingly haunted by ghostly hallucinations, catching glimpses of Weatherford and his horse lurking in the woods behind his garden, lending the film’s mixed tonal palette a pleasing hint of folk horror.

In his Rotterdam press notes, Dunn relates how the idea for The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford took root while he was showing his wife (and editor) Shakti Bhagchandani around his native Edinburgh. Both were bemused that Harry Potter tourists were overlooking real history in favour of literary fantasy. The fictional swords-and-dragons TV show being gently spoofed here may owe more to Westeros or Middle Earth than Hogwarts, but there are some enjoyable meta-textual connections across the board: Mullan has acting credits in both the Potter and Rings franchises, while Rankin co-starred in the Games of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon.

Like most debut features, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford is slightly marred by a few clunky choices, occasionally falling back on stock character tropes and contrived plot twists. Kenneth’s absurdly naïve bid to cast Oscar in his documentary, for example, feel engineered more for dramatic tension than realism. A promising background subplot about Weatherford’s current heirs is teased then abandoned, reducing the excellent Kerry Fox to a largely pointless one-scene cameo. A final comic pay-off, in which Kenneth makes his peace with the TV production, feels both bitterly ironic and wildly unlikely.

That said, Mullan’s reliably soulful, wounded performance lends a compelling emotional authenticity to even the most implausible scenes. In aesthetic terms, Colombian cinematographer David Gallego finds a fresh beauty in these misty Scottish vistas that goes beyond typical tourist-friendly landscape porn, while British composer Gazelle Twin – aka Elizabeth Bernholz – delivers a richly layered score that combines moody electronica, antique folk instruments and avant-garde choral elements. Both bring an admirably high-art, left-field dimension to the project, accentuating the darker themes running through Dunn’s charming celebration of small-town eccentricity.

In more didactic, less assured hands, The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford could have been a by-the-numbers portrait of a Grumpy Old Man standing up for old-fashioned analogue values against a soulless, shallow, digital age. But while Dunn and Mullan clearly frame Kenneth in sympathetic terms, they also undercut easy sentimentality by showing him as a stubborn old fool, blinded by grief and obsession, his own brand of fan worship as preposterous as the most hardcore Game of Thrones geek. Meanwhile, Weatherford’s droll voice-over clearly marks him out as a pompous snob with a haughty disdain for his fellow man, particularly the lower classes. Both are unreliable narrators with worldviews ill-suited to the 21st century. If there is any cautionary take-home message here, it is that forgetting history is unwise, but so is blinkered reverence towards an overly idealised past.

Director, screenwriter: Seán Dunn
Cast: Peter Mullan, Gayle Rankin, Jakob Oftebro, Sid Sagar, Saskia Ashdown, Cameron Fulton, Lewis MacDougall, Kerry Fox
Cinematography: David Gallego
Editing: Shakti Bhagchandani
Production designer: Jamie Morgan Lapsley
Music: Gazelle Twin
Producers: Alex Polunin, Scott Macaulay, Jennifer Monks
Production companies: Ossian Pictures (UK), Forensic Films (US), Come into the Fold Ltd (UK)
World sales: Charades
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Big Screen Competition)
In English
95 minutes