Children of the Wicker Man: the cult hit that burned its own family

Robin Hardy had seven children and five marriages. Two of those children, Justin and Dominic Hardy, have now made a documentary about what their father's most famous film did to everyone around it. Children of the Wicker Man opened to reviews on 20 October, and it arrives with a paradox baked in: the 1973 folk-horror classic was a box-office flop that became, per the filmmakers' own account, one of the most unsettling and paradoxically influential British films ever made.

The documentary is a hybrid. Part production history of The Wicker Man — a story, as the review notes, already told in books and journalism "a fair few times already" — and part therapy session for the brothers, whose raw feeling is, in the Guardian's words, "sometimes painful to watch". Their willingness to share that pain "remains admirable".

Admirable is not the same as complete.

What's missing from the film?

The review's central criticism is structural: the film is "hampered by omissions and silences". The dead haunt it, literally and editorially. Director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer have both passed away, and living key figures don't appear either.

The absences stack up quickly:

• The brothers' other siblings, unaccounted for on screen
• Allan Brown, author of Inside The Wicker Man: How Not to Make a Cult Classic, name-checked in "several juicy anecdotes" but not interviewed
• By contrast, a "fair amount" of screen time goes to Scottish actor Bill Paterson, who was almost cast in the original film but wasn't — a choice the review calls "somewhat baffling"

That last point stings a little. A near-miss actor gets more minutes than the family members who lived through the aftermath. It's the documentary equivalent of casting the understudy.

From flop to fetish object

The story the Hardys want to tell has two halves. The first is the troubled production of 1973, when The Wicker Man failed at the box office on release. The second is its "strange reemergence as a cult movie-cum-fetish object" — a film that survived its own burial, in the manner of its pagan plot, and returned as something audiences keep for themselves.

The classic, the review acknowledges, still stands "for all its imperfections and peculiarities". Few would argue. What's newer here is the domestic ledger: the cost of a cult classic measured in marriages, siblings and silence rather than studio money.

Does the family angle carry it?

Partly. The brothers' candour gives the film its charge, and the production anecdotes retain their grip even on a third or fourth telling. But a documentary about legacy that leaves out most of the legatees has a hole where its heart should be. When your subject had seven children and you hear from two, the audience notices the arithmetic.

The verdict, then, is mixed: an admirable, agonised, incomplete excavation. Whether Children of the Wicker Man deepens the cult or merely reruns it may depend on a director's-cut edition that fills the silences — with the siblings, and with Brown, still waiting by the phone.