James Nesbitt prepares to make a sacrifice that will grant him magical powers in OUTCAST.
with dignity and unstated power), while the mys- terious figure who hires Cathal to hunt makes his home on a travellers’ caravan site. Indeed, the film initially hints at strangeness with nothing more than pendants dangling on car windshields—objects Lovecraft would have described as curious. Alan Garner once rebuked readers for failing
to see that THE OWL SERVICE was “only inciden- tally concerned with the problems of first-genera- tion educated illegitimate Welsh males.” He apparently meant to underline his commitment to retelling myths, but that book and RED SHIFT (his masterpiece) have a real sense of adolescent angst and its consequences. All is true of OUTCAST too. Some comments have objected that the relation- ship between Petronella and Fergal develops too swiftly, but the pace and underlying desperation ring true enough to my experience. We may note that the place that becomes most significant to them is a play area with swings, a last trace of childhood. There’s also a suggestion that Fergal’s perceptiveness (which allows him to draw a por- trait of his father without having seen him) begins to desert him as he becomes more involved with Petronella. The film deftly sketches their motives, and the speed of their progress is to an extent due to the admirable succinctness of the narrative, but their haste seems to lead some viewers to find the couple unsympathetic. I’m not sure why this
matters—I don’t see why people should expect to identify with characters who don’t exist. Surely, truthful depiction is enough.
The relationship is threatened by a monster— the beast Fergal has been led to believe is in some sense imminent. For most of the film it’s barely glimpsed, and at times (very much like Michael Myers in Carpenter’s film) only just heard; it may take an alert viewer to piece together exactly what happens when Petronella’s brother Tomatsk (Josh Whitelaw) encounters her thuggish former boy- friend James (Andrew Martin). When the creature finally erupts into view, it has some of the look of an Oriental demon—an attempt to reclaim super- natural horror from Asian dominance? It’s the prod- uct of shape-shifting, and a flurry of last-minute dialogue allies it with the conventions of screen lycanthropy; we’re told it has to be killed in a par- ticular way, only for another to prove to be neces- sary. If this is a rare moment where the film falters, having yielded to the need for explanation, the coda regains control. The inevitable has overtaken Petronella, but whereas too many films would present her fate as a pop-up shock, the ending of OUTCAST is enigmatic and poignant. The British DVD offers a fine transfer of the film, but a director’s commentary would have been welcome. The American release from Vivendi appears now to be unavailable.
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