Wrath of the Gods

More than half a century after The Wicker Man transformed an isolated Scottish community, folk songs and pagan ritual into one of British cinema’s most enduring nightmares, Wrath of the Gods arrives carrying an almost impossible inheritance. Directed by Justin Hardy and written by Justin Hardy and his brother Dominic Hardy, the film was developed from an idea discovered among material left behind by their father, Robin Hardy, director of the 1973 classic. That history would already make the project unusual, but its premiere at FrightFest became painfully poignant following the sudden death of Justin Hardy only weeks beforehand. The result consequently feels less like a conventional sequel than the closing of a family circle: a film haunted not merely by fictional gods and ancestral sins, but by the complicated legacy of the people who made it. The brothers had already confronted that inheritance in their documentary Children of the Wicker Man; here they attempt something more dangerous – entering their father’s mythology themselves and finding a way out of it.

Rather than returning to Summerisle, Wrath of the Gods takes us to Hel, a remote North Sea island whose name immediately announces that nothing cheerful awaits. After the suicide of her fisherman husband Ingram, played by Jamie Rhodes, grieving widow Anna, embodied with impressive restraint by Christiane Schaldemose, returns with her daughter Gudrun, played by Martha Robertson, to the place her husband once called home. The welcome is predictably glacial. Anna is treated less as a bereaved wife than as an intruder carrying misfortune ashore, while her formidable father-in-law Tulloch, played by Francis Magee, seems capable of turning every conversation into an interrogation. When children begin disappearing, private grief expands into something darker, exposing resentments, violence and secrets that have been preserved by isolation as efficiently as anything sealed inside an archaeological tomb. The premise deliberately echoes The Wicker Man – an outsider, a missing child, suspicious islanders and truths hidden behind local customs – yet the film gradually reveals that it is playing a different game.

Its greatest asset is unquestionably the Shetland landscape. Wrath of the Gods looks as though the North Atlantic itself is trying to expel everyone from the screen. Wind tears across the grass, rain seems permanently suspended in the air and stone houses offer protection without ever suggesting comfort. The production cleverly incorporates the visual heritage of Shetland and the Up Helly Aa tradition, but the film is most convincing when mythology is allowed to seep quietly through everyday life rather than being announced. Even the Norse-influenced language helps Hel feel culturally separated from the mainland. There is a roughness here that occasionally works in the film’s favour: instead of the seductive artificiality that made Summerisle such an uncanny playground, Hel feels inhabited, weathered and exhausted. Cinematographer Robin Keane frequently allows the environment to dwarf the characters, while composer Guy Dagul and the sound team turn wind, sea and music into an almost continuous atmospheric pressure. This is folk horror in which geography does much of the haunting.

At the centre of that landscape, Christiane Schaldemose gives the film the emotional gravity its sometimes unruly screenplay desperately needs. Anna is not another Sergeant Howie marching confidently toward an explanation; she arrives already damaged, carrying grief, guilt and a complicated history with the island. Christiane Schaldemose plays those contradictions without excessive signalling, making Anna’s determination feel less heroic than necessary. Yet Francis Magee is the performer who most aggressively occupies the screen. His Tulloch is a magnificent wall of beard, anger and barely restrained violence, frightening precisely because tenderness toward his granddaughter can coexist with hostility toward almost everybody else. Martha Robertson, meanwhile, gives Gudrun an appropriately withdrawn quality that makes the child seem simultaneously vulnerable and strangely attuned to a world the adults cannot properly read. Around these strong performances, however, the supporting ensemble is less consistent, and certain exchanges have a stiffness that punctures the carefully accumulated dread.

The larger difficulty is structural. The Wicker Man remains extraordinary because virtually every eccentric detail eventually clicks into position; what initially resembles digression becomes evidence, and what seems comic becomes horrifying. Wrath of the Gods never achieves that frightening mathematical precision. Its first half patiently scatters mysteries concerning Ingram, Anna, the islanders, religion, misogyny, inherited violence and missing children, but patience occasionally slips into inertia. More damagingly, several revelations arrive without the cinematic emphasis needed to make them truly detonate. The film can generate tension – sometimes remarkably well – only to release it through an awkward transition or a character decision that feels dictated by the screenplay rather than human instinct. There are fascinating ideas here about communities turning suffering into tradition and families transforming trauma into inheritance, but too many compete for attention. The gods may dominate the title, yet the most persuasive monsters are resolutely human.

That distinction also explains why comparisons with The Wicker Man are simultaneously inevitable and slightly unfair. Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer constructed the original around the terrifying certainty of belief: Summerisle worked because an entire community subscribed to a coherent worldview, however monstrous its consequences. Wrath of the Gods is more fractured. Christianity, Norse mythology, local ritual and contemporary attitudes collide, but none quite becomes the organising principle of Hel. Curiously, this weakness also produces the new film’s most interesting idea. Perhaps the old gods no longer possess enough power to terrify us; perhaps what survives is merely the behaviour justified in their name, passed from parents to children until abuse starts masquerading as heritage. Seen from that angle, the film’s shift from supernatural expectation toward painfully human horror becomes less a failure to imitate The Wicker Man than a melancholy statement about what remains after faith itself has eroded.

There is a remarkable irony in a film so concerned with inherited burdens becoming inseparable from its own inheritance. Robin Hardy spent decades attempting to extend the universe of The Wicker Man, eventually making The Wicker Tree in 2011, while Justin Hardy and Dominic Hardy later examined the enormous personal cost of that obsession in Children of the Wicker Man. The idea that eventually became Wrath of the Gods emerged from their father’s recovered archive, meaning that completing the trilogy became both an act of filmmaking and an act of family archaeology. Dominic Hardy has recalled seeing The Wicker Man as a twelve-year-old at a private Soho screening, long before anyone could know that this initially troubled production would become a cultural monument. Decades later, the sons found themselves completing the mythology that had shadowed their family. The dedication of Wrath of the Gods to their mother Caroline Hardy, whose contribution to the original film went largely unrecognised publicly for years, gives that final gesture additional resonance.

Wrath of the Gods is therefore easier to admire than completely surrender to. It is uneven, occasionally cumbersome and unable to summon the escalating dread or devastating finality of the masterpiece whose shadow stretches across every frame. Yet dismissing it simply for not being another The Wicker Man would miss what makes this strange final chapter worthwhile. Its rain-lashed Shetland locations possess genuine elemental force, Christiane Schaldemose provides a compelling emotional centre, Francis Magee delivers its most memorable performance, and flashes of something raw and authentically unsettling repeatedly break through the film’s imperfections. Most importantly, Justin Hardy does not merely reproduce his father’s bonfire. He and Dominic Hardy allow it to burn down and examine what remains in the ashes: grief, damaged families, inherited stories and the dangerous human desire to give suffering a mythology. As the conclusion to an unconventional trilogy – and, tragically, the final film of Justin Hardy – Wrath of the Gods may not make the old gods thunder as loudly as one might hope, but its quieter ghosts linger after the storm.

Wrath of the Gods
Directed by Justin Hardy
Written by Justin Hardy, Dominic Hardy
Produced by Chris Nunn, Alison Palmer
Starring: Francis Magee, Christiane Schaldemose, Lynsey Rendall, Martha Robertson
Cinematography: 
Edited by: 
Music by: 
Production companies: 
Distributed by: 
Release dates: August 28, 2026 - Tubi FrightFest world premiere
Running time: 94 minutes

Viewed on August 22, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)