Crew
Director/Screenplay – David A. Roberts, Producers – Scott Bishop, Shaun Bishop, Keith Lupton & David A. Roberts, Photography – Shaun Bishop, Music – Gerald Buckfield, Visual Effects Supervisor – Scott Bishop, Additional Visual Effects – Charlie Coakley & Adam Gee, Makeup/Prosthetic Effects – Andrew Sexton, Production Design – Keith Lupton. Production Company – Wagyu Films.
Cast
Rory Wilson (Chris Rivers), Ieuan Coombs (Billy Duffy), Scott Bishop (The Policeman), Lindsay Bennett-Thompson (Paula Connor), Keith Lupton (The Watcher), Jonathan Keeble (Voice of The Watcher), Nicole Carino (Voice of Karen)
Plot
Chris Rivers has abruptly left his pregnant wife and job behind and retreated to a remote cottage in Wales. There he tries to make sense of a series of notes and video recordings left by his best friend Billy Duffy who has gone missing. Billy talks of a cult that believe in ‘primordial fear’ – the meaninglessness of the universe and of the cult’s belief in a sleeping god that is dreaming all human existence and how they see it as their duty to awaken it and extinguish reality. Billy talks of how he and his friends began tracing the signs of the cult in Bosnia only to find they were being stalked across Europe. As Chris settles in at the cottage, he begins to see shadowy figures and whispering voices invoking him to join them.
Older Gods was the feature-length directorial debut for David A. Roberts who had previously worked as a commercials director.
By its very title, Older Gods suggests that it is going to be a Lovecraftian Film. Lovecraft had a race of ancient and incredibly powerful entities he called the Elder Gods, this has an ancient and incredibly powerful entity and is titled Older Gods. Even aside from that, the plot of a questor after forbidden knowledge digging up ancient secrets about the nature of reality and the shadowy cult engaged in occult rituals is pure Lovecraft. Although if anything, what Older Gods comes closest to is one of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s rehashes of Lovecraftian themes of cosmic horror in films like The Endless (2017) and Something in the Dirt (2022).
Older Gods has a fantastic opening. The narrator talks of Primordial Fear, the belief that life and everything is utterly pointlessness, and of the cult who believe that all of reality is being dreamt by a slumbering Deity, and of how their purpose is to bring about the awakening of said deity in order to snuff out all of existence. It is a fantastically original idea – one that taps the grand cosmic vision of Lovecraft and adds something quite unique.
Director David A. Roberts does a great job creating a sense of paranoia – from the initial vision of cosmic nihilism to the mounting atmosphere surrounding Rory Wilson of mysterious figures in black seen in the ground outside the cottage, voices whispering invoking him to join them, rains of dead birds and zombified cultists in the woods and sneaking through the house, or his vision of standing on a horizon beneath a giant inverted pyramid.
On the other hand, the greatest frustration of Older Gods is that it is all brooding without any payoff. This is the sort of thing that should form the first act of a film, maybe even a reasonable portion of the second, and for it to then go somewhere. The disappointment is that it never does. Rory Wilson challenges the cult figures and then ends up in some kind of netherworld/afterlife where his best friend appears, before he wakes up safely in a hospital bed where everything is okay and his wife is waiting, before an ambiguous final shot that shows that the threat has not ended.
Trailer here