Sunset Song

Agyness Deyn stars in Terence Davies’ moving drama about a strong young woman facing many adversities in the run up to WWI.

It’s the early 20th-century in rural Scotland and Chris Guthrie is a young woman with ambition, but family life and her religious father’s formidable presence have their own pull. As her family dynamic shifts around her and romance comes calling, WWI begins. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel gives Terence Davies a broad canvas of rain-lashed farmland on which to apply his knack for literary adaptation.

Agyness Deyn's tremendous performance as Chris commands attention in every scene of Davies' epic, supplemented by Peter Mullan and Kevin Guthrie as the two equally troublesome men in her lives; her volcanically tempered father and a husband traumatised from his stint in the trenches. Davies was born and raised in Liverpool but harboured a desire to explore the landscape and stories of his Scottish heritage. His film is a moving portrait of rural life amid social upheaval which loses none of the elemental power of Grassic Gibbon’s novel.