Blu-ray Review: David Keating’s Misunderstood CHERRY TREE

David Keating’s bizarre CHERRY TREE gets the SHOCK review.

When David Keating’s CHERRY TREE began slinking around the festival circuit, fan response was anything but sweet. And critical reaction was equally sour. And I kind of understand why. Keating’s previous film was the disturbing and eloquent contemporary British/Irish folk horror opus WAKEWOOD, a movie that was widely praised and was one of the first films released by the newly minted incarnation of Hammer Films.

With the bar set that high, CHERRY TREE was doomed to be judged unfairly.

But that’s unfortunate because CHERRY TREE is a rather interesting work, a film that similarly mines well-worn myth and earthy, supernatural horror and re-frames it for the modern age. But in WAKEWOOD, the necromancy shenanigans took place in a rural village, seemingly untouched by the outside world. CHERRY TREE’s drama plays out in a familiar, mundane, working class landscape. So what seemed steeped in a kind of alien beauty in the former picture, appears on the surface a silly and sloppy perversion in the latter.

But this writer saw those so-called “flaws” as welcome eccentricities, streaks of strangeness that shook up what could easily have been a connect-the-dots shocker and instead made the material kinky and more than a bit amusingly out of control.

CHERRY TREE stars Naomi Battrick as Faith, an appropriately named teenager who is decent and true and who dotes on her ailing father (Sam Hazeldine), whose cancer has just been diagnosed as terminal. While Faith struggles with her, um, faith in mankind, her lithe and leering field hockey coach Sissy spies on her sullen angst and befriends the girl. Almost immediately, Sissy reveals that she is a witch, the mother of an ancient coven and tells the shaken Faith that she has the power to heal her dying dad. All that the comely crone needs in return is for Faith to get knocked up and give her coven a child.

After considering her options, Faith agrees and, in the movie’s weirdest scene (which we exclusively premiered here), Faith has sex with a boy who has long pined for her, both of their eyes blowing out black and an army of Sissy-sicked centipedes scurrying into their orifices as they mutually climax.

Really, I ask you, how could you NOT respond to a movie about a British gym teacher who manipulates her students to shag with intent to procreate and then shoves bugs in them while they do it?

It’s the kind of weirdness that someone like Ken Russell would revel in and likely be lauded for. But not Keating. He was lambasted.

Furthering general audience isolation are the ensuing events, with Sissy morphing into a cherry monster (the title refers to the fact that the coven likes to eat cherries from a tree nurtured by human blood) and delivering long speeches about the coming of the antichrist.

All of this happens. And all of it is blackly comic, gross, unhinged and never, ever boring.

I appreciate Keating’s boldness. His desire to defy expectations and deliver a sort of “anti-horror” horror movie. Whatever the joke is in CHERRY TREE, Keating is most assuredly in on it.

And so is Walton, who commands the kind of smiling, sensual and cerebral evil feminine presence that actresses like Alice Krige have long perfected, insinuating herself into her victim’s lives and reveling in inflicting misery, all the while still being oddly sympathetic. She’s fantastic, just as mesmerizing as a predator here as she was vulnerable prey in director Axel Carolyn’s pretty debut feature SOULMATE. And Battrick ‘s Faith matches her, standing defiant against the monster who has duped her into renting her womb out to the Devil.

If I have any serious complaint about CHERRY TREE, it’s in regards to its almost unforgivable final sequence, particularly the last shot, which renders Keating’s meandering hot mess of a matriarchal horror movie into a cheapjack viral scare video.

The ending sucks. Plain and simple.

But if you prepare yourself for it, you might be able to forgive it.

I’m having trouble.

Otherwise, CHERRY TREE is a pretty nifty dose of femme-centric shock that might just become a cult film.

The movie is on VOD now and will hit bare-bones Blu-ray and DVD on April 5th from Dark Sky Films.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn2kBW6ORgg