Eight for Silver

The first scene is not set in the 19th century but at the Somme in 1916, where a wounded French captain reaches a surgical tent and the surgeon pulls four bullets out of his belly, one of them made of silver. 'Eight for Silver' unfolds backwards from there, written, directed and shot by Sean Ellis himself, as he had already done on 'Metro Manila' and 'Anthropoid'. It premiered at Sundance in January 2021 under a different title, 'Eight for Silver', and reached American cinemas a year later under the one it kept.

Around 1881, in the French countryside, a Romani clan camps on land they claim as theirs and lay their papers before the local worthies. Seamus Laurent, who owns the estate, answers by organising a slaughter. Before she dies, the old woman leading the clan buries a set of silver dentures shaped like a wolf's fangs along with a curse on the man who ordered it.

From that night on, the village children all dream the same thing, a scarecrow and a set of silver teeth. One of them knows where they are buried, and what happens when he digs them up leaves the Laurent boy bitten and then missing. The neighbours talk about a wild animal. The one who doesn't buy it is John McBride, a pathologist who turns up asking after the travellers and who has seen before what really walks that wood.

Boyd Holbrook plays McBride, Kelly Reilly, Beth in 'Yellowstone', the lady of the house and Alistair Petrie the landowner, with Roxane Duran and Áine Rose Daly among the servants. Ellis shot on 35mm with anamorphic lenses in the Charente region of western France, and staged the massacre of the clan in one distant wide shot. He told Variety he tried to do as much as possible in camera rather than add it later, because he thinks it looks better that way. Robin Foster wrote the score and Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Yorgos Lanthimos's regular editor, cut it.

After Sundance it played Sitges in October 2021, went up for the top prize at Gérardmer and came away empty-handed from Camerimage, where its Golden Frog nomination for cinematography belonged to the director himself. In the United States it opened ninth over the Presidents' Day weekend and finished close to four and a half million dollars. Reviews were mostly favourable, generous about the look and rather less convinced by the scares. British viewers can rent or buy it on Prime Video and Apple TV.

• Horror
• Drama
• Thriller