Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, Appearing in Person. With Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt
UK 1978, 35mm, color 86 min

One of Skolimowski’s most arresting, enigmatic and brilliant films, The Shout features a mesmerizing Alan Bates as a mysterious, otherwordly stranger who arrives in a small English town to unsettle the lives and inexplicably tense marriage of a young couple. Working with famed art-cinema producer Jeremy Thomas, Skolimowski transformed Robert Graves’ story into a dark fantasy about masculinity, marriage and the dream life. The Shout makes remarkable use of sound to suggest a terrifyingly fragile and unstable world embodied in the polar figures of John Hurt as a cocksure sound artist trying to capture the soundscapes hidden in the everyday and Bates as a beautiful monster whose sonorous voice conceals a terrible gift.