Zombos Says: Almost fully terrifying, but bogs down from a slow pace.
Some movies take a lot of time to build suspense or atmosphere. I think movement is more important than time. That movement can come from the camera, from dialog, and from how the story plays out. The Moor, directed by Chris Cronin and written by Paul Thomas has four truly chilling moments surrounded by a lot of dull moments that stretch its running time almost as large as the titular Moor that Bill (David Edward-Robertson), Claire (Sophia La Porta), Ellie (Elizabeth Dormer-Philips), Alex (Mark Peachey), and Liz (Vicki Hackett) find themselves trudging through. I will say up front that Sam Cronin, the cinematographer, makes me dislike that moor (filmed in Yorkshire, England). The endless, boggy and foggy moor-scape imaged here is, alone, quite unsettling. I can see why this movie won the Best Scare at the Total Film FrightFest Awards in 2023, but you will need to be patient because the scares come toward the last third or so of the movie. The last scare, on that dreary moor, is classic.
Bill’s son went missing twenty-five years ago. Since then, he has been searching the moor with the help of Liz, a ranger with experience and sense, something he starts losing throughout the movie. He approaches Claire, a former podcaster, to drum up attention to the case again, as the child-abductor is actually known and was sent to prison for twenty-five years. But with the chance of him being released, Bill is desperate to find anything on the moor that will keep him in prison.
Claire has a troubling–for her–backstory. It was her friend, Bill’s son, who she was with just before the boy vanished. She blames herself, has weird nightmares (nicely tinted in that weird nightmare blue) and tends toward being morose to the point of making her a difficult lead character to watch. She tends to blend into the wallpaper in every scene. Most of the time, the other actors join that wallpaper. There seems to be a monotony throughout, until events take a turn for the worse; then we see more energy breaking through the inertia in the acting, which leans to ponderous at times or stifling with everyone talking in drawn-out sentences, like newbies on the first day of acting class. I almost wanted to shout “just say the f’ing sentence already, without pauses!” a few times.
There seems to be a trend of horror movies that should have been thirty or more minutes shorter or, at least, provide a good reason for the added minutes. The initial meeting at the diner, between Bill and Claire, is painfully drawn out, which continues through much that follows including the dialog bridging important events. Those events provide a welcome kick to the movement that keeps trying to break free.
Claire is reluctant at first to join Bill and Liz on the moor. She hesitates stepping into it from the road and has panic attacks; but she finds a shoe and has a growing fear, though she does not know why. She finds a body but it is not Bill’s son. That finding is the first creepy scare. She learns Bill uses a douser, Alex, holding a pendant above a map of the moor to find places to search. She then learns the moor spreads across a much larger area than she thought, so her finding the shoe and the body were not accidents. Something is compelling her.
The douser’s more gifted daughter (Eleanor) gets involved, leading to the next chilling kick, through Thomas, her guardian spirit, and a séance that reveals an evil presence on the moor that wants more than just little kids. Beautiful imagery, very foreshadowing of terror to come.
Soon everyone is on the moor, seeing and hearing weird things and putting up shelter because the weather turns bad. Night comes and the usual separate and attack horror trope drives the group in different directions. Cue the third well-constructed and terrifying event that abruptly disperses the group. Bill and a reluctant Claire return to the moor, and it culminates in the final truly horrifying image to end the movie on: stuff to give you a nightmare for sure.
The Moor cannot decide if it is a found-footage POV movie, a faux documentary kind of movie, or a straightforward horror drama (no humor at all). Dated news interviews with villagers about the missing children and the subsequent capture of the person responsible pop up in the early half of the movie, buzz-killing any forward movement with lengthy and unnecessary backstory and dialog: remove them from the movie and there is no change to the storyline. The ending is shot as an omniscient POV (Claire’s) that is effective to the point it loses its own logic at the end.
What remains is a mystery, and that is the most compelling element of this story. The Moor borrows a little from Japanese Horror, that always looks like it explains what is truly happening but never really does. It also envelopes us in the folkloric ancient evil that permeates a place. What keeps it from being more intense, and scarier, is the pacing, which insists on using time instead of movement. But when the movement comes it is quite terrifying indeed.