Sean Ellis’ “Eight for Silver” is one of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal. It’s a Gothic horror picture that seems to set itself up as ambitious and intelligent, only to succumb to the most tiresome tropes and lazy shortcuts of the genre’s lesser efforts.
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Its opening scenes hint at more. In a gruesome but effective prologue, a brutal battle ends the life of a French officer; as the combat doctor removes bullets from his body, he finds one that is decidedly not a German bullet. The large, pointed slab of silver is returned to his sister; the dying man she takes it to informs her that she “must now be the keeper of the silver.”
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“I want nothing to do with the silver!” she replies, and Ellis then takes us back 35 years to find out why. The silver, we discover, was the possession of a group of Travelers, one of whom growls, “We have protected it for generations. And it has protected our generations.” She announces this as she’s having it melted down, from 30 coins, into an assortment of teeth (it looks like one of those old novelty chattering teeth sets, but scarier). This preparation comes as a land dispute between the Travelers and a group of wealthy “elders” is coming to a head, and while the elders win the battle, the Travelers, as the saying goes, win the war.
The teeth are part of a potent curse, which first manifests itself in the nightmares of the area’s children, and then in vicious attacks on each other, and others in the village. Around this time, a stranger comes into town, a pathologist by the name of John McBride (Boyd Holbrook); he’s hired by the Laurents, Seamus (Alistair Petrie), and Isabelle Laurent (Kelly Reilly), whose son went missing after one of the attacks. McBride saw something like this before – an otherworldly beast that killed several people in a village years back, including McBride’s wife and daughter.
Ellis (who also helmed “Anthropoid”) knows from atmosphere; a clammy fog hangs over the woods near the Laurent estate, and he mounts the sequences of things going bump in the night with precision. He wields the gore (and there is plenty of it) with skill, and the period details are convincing. And he throws in some impressive visual flourishes – most notably, playing out the big, bloody confrontation between the Travelers and elders in a single, distant wide shot, forgoing the more visceral and conventionally “exciting” coverage typical of such sequences to underline the complete, quick, and staggering decimation that follows.
At its best, “Eight for Silver” seems to be mining a similar vein of period horror and woodsy dread as “The Witch” – aside from its period setting and Gothic overtones, it moves (initially) at a deliberate pace, has a comparable sense of smarts. But Ellis, who wrote and directed, doesn’t have the discipline (or the patience) to ape that picture’s slow build to terror, or its sense of restraint. He seems constantly looking for a quick scare fix to tide the viewer over, or at least that’s the only explanation I can come up with for the tiresome overuse of that mustiest of the devices, the screeching scare followed by the wake-up from a nightmare. I counted, no kidding, six of those moments, one of them a double-tap, in which a character jump-scare wakes up out of a nightmare, which is then immediately revealed, by another jump-scare to be a nightmare itself. It’s the tackiest, dumbest ploy for cheap thrills there is.
And the monster, when it’s finally, clearly seen (at around the halfway mark), is a miscalculation. It’s a sleek CG beast, and after that initial teasing, we see too much of it, too often; the look of the creature, the feel of it, is anachronistically contemporary. It looks too slick, too smooth and slippery. If ever there was a 21st-century horror movie that cried out for a Hammer-style practical monster, it’s this one.
The construction of the narrative – what we learn in the prologue, and the direction it takes in the third act – has an unfortunate side effect. We know, by the 90-minute mark, everything that will follow, aside from the justification for the inevitable bloodbath climax, a story beat staggering in its stupidity. But by that point, I had pretty much lost patience with “Eight for Silver” anyway. It’s a great-looking movie, with a fine cast (Reilly is particularly good) and a workable premise. The raw materials were clearly in place. Too bad they never came together. [C-]
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