There’s a terrific episode of The Simpsons in which Springfield is chosen as the shooting location for a film adaptation of geek-favourite comic serial, ‘Radioactive Man’. Much of the funniest material concerns the town cynically sacrificing its cultural identity to extract any and all cash from the Hollywood talent’s extended stay.
To some extent, the indie dramedy The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, the debut feature of writer-director Seán Dunn, plays like that Simpsons episode, updated to reflect how a modern IP adaptation might dominate and disrupt an even smaller town. And the additional twist on this set-up is quite intriguing, in theory: what if the most devoted advocate of the town’s own history got so frustrated by the ensuing media circus that he took matters into his own hands?
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In the (fictional) Scottish village of Arberloch, Kenneth (Peter Mullan) works in the visitor centre as a tour guide, specialising as an expert in the area’s most notable historical figure, Sir Douglas Weatherford, an 18th-century inventor and philosopher who Kenneth proudly claims as his ancestor. A year on from his wife’s death, Kenneth has developed a devotion to the job that keeps him going though his alcoholism, and his one-track mind about his famous relative causing estrangement from his daughter Anna (Gayle Rankin) and his young granddaughter.
Kenneth’s tunnel vision also leads him to miss the news that a big-budget fantasy TV series, The White Stag of Emberfell, is setting up camp locally for its latest season, with the show’s costumed fans descending on the town. Kenneth’s bosses transform the visitor centre and Weatherford-themed walking tour into an Emberfell fan experience. Descending into madness, Kenneth becomes obsessed with making a Weatherford documentary to correct Arberloch’s international profile. He also wants to recruit Emberfell’s handsome lead, Oscar Sorenson (Jakob Oftebro), to his cause by any means necessary.
There’s a dash of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy here, a hint of the Steve Martin filmmaking satire Bowfinger there. And if you had a bad time with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s recent monster mash, The Bride!, Dunn’s film occasionally borrows that movie’s device of Mary Shelley possessing the protagonist from beyond the grave. Physically performed by Gary McCormack and voiced by Jonathan Hyde, the spirit of Sir Douglas narrates the film and tries to approach Kenneth during nighttime visions.
If this sounds a bit chaotic for a film that’s also clearly positioned in the great British tradition of small-town comedies, the results unfortunately reflect there perhaps being too many eggs in an overflowing basket of ideas. Mullan remains ever watchable even with flimsy material, but the movie’s most biting commentary is entirely metatextual: Scottish film and TV production in the past decade-plus has effectively been propped up by eight seasons of the American-produced historical fantasy Outlander. No prizes for guessing which actor has recently appeared in that show’s ongoing spin-off.
