Very disappointing...

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Gorgeously filmed, but that's all. Middling performances, and a screenplay that sinks the musicality of Gibbon's Scottish prose in a mire of pedestrian modern clichés.

The movie makers decided to take Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel about Chrissie and the impact of WW1 on the whole community and turn it into a story about one couple. The novel already creates an insular, boxed in feeling of one community following old Scots' ways and takes just one corner of the box. It makes the story claustrophobic. We lose the impact of loving all the ancillary characters like Chae and Long Rob, so their fates don't become important to us- it is just an after thought comment in the film. And the beautiful concluding speech by the pastor under the ancient stones is not in the film, so the whole idea of WHOSE Sunset Song it is does not strike us. The film is beautiful and lead actors good, but the poor decisions on how to frame the story line made it ultimately a disappointment if like me, you love this novel. The old Masterpiece Theatre version was superior.

Having voice-over narration throughout the film vastly reduced the visual storytelling expected of film, instead of having it revealed visually and with minimum exposition through dialogue. So much was on-the-nose exposition. As a result, it was tedious to watch. I forced myself to finish the film, just in case it improved - it didn't.I was rarely drawn emotionally into the story, but felt more like a bystander stood next to the film crews during rehearsals. There seemed to be a different emotional feel between internal and external scenes, and I wonder how the choice to shoot digitally and film for internal and external scenes affected this, albeit subconsciously.It was confusing that the narrator sounded like the same person as the lead female actor, but referred to that character by their name, as though it wasn't them.The screenplay adapted from a novel had not been condensed suitably for the limited time available for a film, and seemed to have instead crammed in as many events as possible from the book, and so not leaving enough time to explore any of them to any emotional depth.

Terence Davies's new film treads familiar grounds despite his shift to the early 1900s Highlands. A violent father is brutally insensitive to his oldest son and daughter — and to his wife, who kills herself and her infant twins when she finds he has impregnated her again. The son weds and removes himself to Argentina but we follow the daughter, Chris, as she takes over the farm and matures into motherhood and womanhood. The mother's most poignant speech teaches Chris that women are helpless before men. By men the mother has in mind brutes like her husband, not gentle idealists like her oldest son. And like Ewan, the farm boy neighbour Chris weds and loves. The film's leisurely 135 minutes observes the passing of the days and seasons and vicissitudes of life working up to a crucial revelation at the end. Now a father, Ewan is pressured to enlist in the First World War. He comes down the stairs and announces he's off to Aberdeen the way her brother did when he broke away from home. But Ewan was reluctant to leave his wife and bairn.We don't see Ewan's battleground experiences but we see how they've changed him when he storms home for a short leave. Coarse, violent, angry, insulting — he has turned into an irreligious version of her happily departed father. Unlike her mother, though, Chris won't be cowed. The morning after he's raped her she holds him off with a knife: "I'm not afraid of you." He returns coldly to his unit.Chris continues to run the farm without him. She refuses to believe the government letter reporting he died in battle in France. Then his old comrade tells her she should know the truth: Ewan was shot as a coward and deserter. He's telling her because he wants her to get on with her young life. Then we get the film's only flashback. That friend is preparing Ewan to face the firing squad. The Ewan we see is the old Ewan, not the brutalized soldier who was so repulsive on his visit home. Finally believing he's dead, Chris realizes that "He did it for me." That line — and the intrusive flashback — takes some unpacking. Ewan couldn't stay out of the war for her, however he tried, as he was openly charged with cowardice. Nor could he prevent the war's brutalizing effect on him. So to save her from having to live with the brute he has become he has himself killed. As we view the firing squad from his perspective Davies implicates the citizenry in the savagery that launches and embraces warfare. Not sharing her mother's cynical experience of men, Chris remembers the Ewan she loved, the gentle, considerate man. So she infers that he had himself killed rather then impose on her what the war had made him. That's the song she sings to his sunset.