Crew
Director – Brian Gilbert, Screenplay – Anthony Horowitz, Producers – Pippa Cross, Marc Samuelson & Peter Samuelson, Photography – Martin Fuhrer, Music – Anne Dudley, Digital Visual Effects – The Moving Picture Company (Supervisors – Ed Hawkins & Greg Salter), Special Effects Supervisor – Richard Conway, Prosthetics – Animated Extras, Makeup Design – Elizabeth Tagg, Production Design – Caroline Amies. Production Company – Granada Film/The Isle of Man Film Commission/Samuelson Productions.
Cast
Christina Ricci (Cassie Grant), Ioan Gruffudd (Dan Blakeley), Stephen Dillane (Simon Kirkman), Kerry Fox (Marion Kirkman), Simon Russell Beale (Luke Fraser), Harry Forrester (Michael Blakeley), Robert Hardy (The Bishop), Jessica Mann (Emma Blakeley), Peter McNamara (Frederick Argyle), Madhav Sharma (Dr Byworth)
Plot
Two young people in the small West Country town of Ashby Wake fall into a hole and uncover a church that has been buried. Dan Blakeley, an expert in the restoration of religious art, is called in to consult. Dan believes the site dates from Roman times and may even have been created by Joseph of Arimathea and people who were witness to The Crucifixion. Dan’s wife Marion is driving home when she hits a woman on the road. The woman Cassie Grant is uninjured but is left amnesiac. Feeling bad about what happened, Marion offers Cassie room to stay at their place. Cassie connects with their two children and they offer her a position as nanny. Meanwhile, the site uncovered by Dan, which appears to have been deliberately buried, and Cassie’s past seem to have sinister connections.
The Gathering comes from British director Brian Gilbert, usually known for more serious arts dramas with the likes of Not Without My Daughter (1991), Tom & Viv (1994), Wilde (1997) and Allegiance (2005). Gilbert’s one other genre film was the US-made bodyswap fantasy Vice Versa (1988). The script comes from Anthony Horowitz, a well-known name in British television who has written numerous episodes of various crime series and created Foyle’s War (2002-15), a detective series set during the Wartime Blitz. In genre material, Horowitz is known for writing episodes of the tv series Robin of Sherwood (1983-6), as well as being creator of The Gift (1990), a mini-series about a psychically gifted kid, the time travel detective series Crime Traveller (1997) and the invisible man series The Vanishing Man (1998). By far the bulk of Anthony Horowitz’s writing has been his output of children’s books. The most popular of these was the Alex Rider series concerning a teenage spy, later filmed as Stormbreaker (2006) and the tv series Alex Rider (2020-4).
The Gathering was made as quite a prestige production. It has a reasonable cast, including importing a 23-year-old Christina Ricci who was just starting to come into her own as an indie adult actress, along with British stalwarts like Kerry Fox, Robert Hardy, Ioan Gruffuff who was a hot property in the early 2000s, and a then less well-known Stephen Dillane. And it is produced Granada Film, the film offshoot of the UK’s ITV Channel.
The Gathering came out around the same time as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) – see the film version The Da Vinci Code (2006). You get the impression it was conceived to tap a similar vein. Both have similar plots about a mystery that ties back to the time of Christ, in this case an archaeological mystery, and a somewhat similar plot about people in the midst dealing with a sinister organised conspiracy, although things differ widely after that point.
The Gathering was pitched as a horror film but it comes with the sedate pace of a British arts drama. It is not until about two-thirds of the way in that the horror element emerges as one character goes on a shooting spree and we get a couple of bloody deaths. That is also the time that some of the film’s other problems become apparent. Up to that point, we are given intermittent mystery about Christina Ricci’s amnesia, the discovery of the mysterious church that may date back to the time of Christ, mention of immortal observers and various locals around the town behaving in a sinister way and following Christina. Some of these prove to be red herrings that are not what they seem or even sinister threats at all when the main revelation becomes apparent.
Unfortunately, the film is killed by a denouement that doesn’t really work. [PLOT SPOILERS] Here it is revealed that there is a secret group of people who have been around since the time of Christ and are destined to witness disasters. It is none too clear in the script why they are there – are they akin to the time travellers in Timescape (1992) or have they been given a curse of immortality due to witnessing the crucifixion? The big twist is that both Christina Ricci and cute guy Ioan Gruffudd are part of the group too. The final scenes are of the unearthed church being reburied even though the end reveals there was nothing sinister about it.
Trailer here
Full film available here