Crew
Director/Screenplay/Production Design – Andrew Rakich, Producers – Veronia Payton & Andrew Rakich, Photography – Eduardo Ureña, Music – Dillon ReRosa, Visual Effects Supervisor – Blair Rowan. Production Company – Atun-Shei Films.
Cast
Benton Guinness (John Fletcher), Linnea Gregg (Widow Patience Gavett), Josh Popa (Josiah Cutting), Matthew Van Gessel (Isaac Goodenow), Kendra Unique (Flora), Carl Sailor (Reverend Thomas Russell), Andrew Rakich (Mr Gavett)
Plot
17th Century Massachusetts. Magistrates John Fletcher and Josiah Cutting travel from Boston to Sudbury to hear the story of Isaac Goodenow who claims to have seen a spirit in the woods. Fletcher and Cutting insist that Goodenow accompany them back to the area in the woods so that they can see for themselves. On the journey, Goodenow becomes increasing mentally unstable, especially when they come to a stone in a clearing. A deranged maid Flora appears to them and they take her prisoner, but Josiah is driven to couple with her in the night. They then encounter Widow Gavett who takes the men prisoner and announces that she plans to sacrifice them.
Andrew Rakich is a YouTube filmmaker. Since 2018, he has been managing the YouTube channel Atun-Shei Films, which specialises in well-researched explorations of areas of US history. He debunks issues about the US Civil War, looks into battles, and assorted aspects of local history. In his day job, Rakich works as a New Orleans tour guide. The Sudbury Devil was Rakich’s debut as a feature filmmaker. He had previously made a couple of items of genre interest with the 56-minute SF comedy Alien, Baby! (2017) and the comedy series Frozen ‘50s Man (2021- ). Rakich can also be seen on screen here as the husband of the witch who turns up in the latter half of the film.
Rakich made The Sudbury Devil as a cooperative with his cast and crew on a $25,000 budget raised through crowd-funding, while independently distributing the film. Rakich also determined that the cast would speak in accents that were authentic to the film’s historical period. This and the arcane dialogue does prove a strain to follow – such that I found it easier to watch the film with the subtitles on. The only point that punctured the film’s historical authenticity for me was seeing Josh Popa wearing an anachronistic machine-knitted toque or woollen beanie in the early scenes, although Rakich is such a determined historic authenticist that you suspect there must have been some historical antecedent for such.
The film you are immediately reminded of as The Sudbury Devil starts is Robert Eggers’ The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) and its similar sense of Puritans fearful of deviltry in the woods and how this begins to mess with their rigid moral mindset. Both films immerse the audience in the sense of period and its way of speech and dress. The other film I kept thinking of was Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) with its group of men fleeing through a field and into a series of phantasmagorical hallucinations that play out in their mind.
It is not long before Andrew Rakich gets the three men out into the woods and things start to become deranged. This includes their guide Matthew Van Gessel reduced to a gibbering idiot and given to seizures. This is followed by the appearance of Kendra Unique as the African maid who has to be chained up where she gives a performance that consists of a series of crazed, wild-eyed, primal glares. There’s the completely out there scenes of her masturbating and turning Josh Pope on who is then seen wildly rutting with her by firelight. And not long after we get the introduction of Linnea Gregg who gives an equally wild performance and engages in her share of wild rutting too, along with invocations to sacrifice.
In the latter sections, The Sudbury Devil becomes filled with wild hallucinations, nude bodies, spilled blood and occult conjurations – even an appearance from possibly The Devil. There is not a lot of plot in these sections but the demented wildness of the film drives the proceedings with a considerable intensity and fascination.
Trailer here