Sundance Review: ‘Eight for Silver’
Part ultraviolent creature feature and part harrowing cautionary tale, Sean Ellis’ Eight for Silver is an ambitious if tonally uneven werewolf thriller anchored by a solid lead performance from Boyd Holbrook.
Eight for Silver, the latest film from British filmmaker Sean Ellis, starts with an intense war sequence that is big in both stakes and scale. As a group of soldiers huddle in a corner to avoid stray bullets and a continuous streams of bombs, Ellis pulls away from them, slowly revealing the true scope of the war zone the soldiers have found themselves in. It is a heavy, harrowing moment, one that will capture the audience’s attention immediately and ensure that their attention. Unfortunately, the rest of Eight for Silver can’t quite live up to that excellent opening sequence, casting a large shadow over the rest of the film’s proceedings.
Taking place in the 1800s, Eight for Silver is set in a remote country village that is rattled by a series of gruesome, vicious attacks by what witnesses describe as a mysterious creature, the likes of which they have never seen before. The desperate townspeople, led by Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie), end up recruiting John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), who has become somewhat of a legend for his handling of similar cases across the country, after the sudden disappearance of Laurent’s young son Joseph (Tom Sweet) in order to track down the source of the attacks. Haunted by eerie visions and dreams that revolve around his shadowy past, McBride soon comes to realize that he may be way in over his head, putting himself and the rest of the townspeople in even bigger jeopardy.
There is a great movie hiding somewhere within Eight for Silver, one that shines a bigger light on the gruesome, tragic acts of colonialism depicted in the film and the consequences that follow it. Throughout the course of the film’s runtime, Ellis demonstrates that he is more than capable of exploring these themes in a contemplative, nuanced manner, particularly in some of the earlier scenes involving Laurent. Instead, he leans into the script’s genre elements, swinging for the fences and just barely missing the mark with an intense, visceral horror movie that starts off strongly but ends up losing steam as it crawls towards its bloody finale.
While Ellis manages to establish a tense, haunting atmosphere of dread right from the start, aided by a brilliant score courtesy of Robin Foster and the foggy nature of the French commune where the movie was filmed, it ends up fading away as the film progresses, with a repetitive middle stretch that does nothing to advance the main storyline but instead lingers on some of the film’s weaker elements, such as the town’s dull politics and a half-baked storyline involving one of the Laurent’s family’s maids. There are still plenty of thrills to be had throughout the film’s runtime, particularly most of the scenes involving the film’s mysterious creature, said to be a werewolf but with a unique creature design unlike anything we’ve seen on film before. Part Xenomorph, part The Thing and part traditional werewolf, these familiar elements combine to create a hybrid completely original and arduously terrifying. It is a thing of nightmares that will undoubtedly leave its mark on the audience.
The main draw, aside from the film’s brilliant and unique creature design, are the performances, with the actors elevating the material they are given and building on subtle moments between their characters in order to bring some much-needed pathos to the role. On paper, the characters of Laurent and his wife Isabelle may have read one-dimensional but in the hands of the incredibly talented Alistair Petrie and Kelly Reilly, who manage to say with their eyes and their stilted, incredibly guarded stances alone what their characters fail to say with their words. It is evident that Laurent and Isabelle have a rocky history together, one that is largely unspoken but vastly explored thanks to the efforts of Petrie and Reilly. Boyd Holbrook, cast as the gruff and mysterious John McBride, is also in top form, delivering a career-best performance with much more complexity simmering beneath his character’s surface than the film’s simple premise may first suggest.
Ultimately, Eight for Silver is a haunting, visceral film from Sean Ellis that attempts to examine the consequences of colonialism through a horror lens but ultimately fails to leave much of a mark due to an uneven tone and glaring pacing issues.
Rating: 3/5
Eight for Silver premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival on January 30, 2021.