The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford

When a fantasy TV series descends on a Scottish town and eclipses its local mythology, a grieving tour guide’s hold on the past begins to slip. Seán Dunn crafts a darkly comic study of ageing, identity and the fictions we cling to when everything around us shifts.

Sir Douglas Weatherford, an eighteenth-century inventor and philosopher, is the most famous son of Arberloch. This unassuming village has a visitors’ centre dedicated to him, where Kenneth works as a tour guide, flamboyantly dressed as Sir Douglas himself. He feels so close to Arberloch’s solitary historical claim that he now speaks of Weatherford almost as a relative. Which, in so many ways, is bad enough. But when a television crew arrives to shoot scenes for a fantasy series with the rather enchanting title The White Stag of Emberfell, Sir Douglas is reduced to a triviality.

With the show’s exuberantly costumed fan base descending on Arberloch and the production spending money on a scale villagers could scarcely imagine, Kenneth’s world begins to collapse.

For his fiction-feature debut, Seán Dunn clearly understands that the casting of a lead can define a film. In Peter Mullan, he has found its centre. Mullan gives Kenneth a bruised dignity that shapes the entire film, revealing the cracks and yearnings of a man who is slowly realising that the world has moved on without him.

– Vanja Kaludjercic

• 

•