Terence Davies is a highly specific and masterful director, one of the best in the history of British cinema. In such films as The Long Day Closes and The Deep Blue Sea, he tells stories of domestic strife while conjuring expressionist and intensely felt depictions of proletarian life in England in the 1940s. He travels a few decades earlier into history in Sunset Song, an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's seminal, Thomas Hardy-esque Scottish novel. The film traces the coming-of-age of schoolgirl Chris (Agyness Deyn, sensitive and subtle) in the years preceding the First World War. Positioned amid an ancient land and a turbulent social order, Chris contends with a tyrannical father (Peter Mullan, the authority on playing robust and cruel men) and falls in love with a doting farmer (Kevin Guthrie) while also slowly fostering her own independence. With his distinctive visual eye, as well as his lifelong fascination with melancholy, nostalgia, and romance as sensations and states of mind, Davies is the ideal director for this intimate epic of agrarian life. He spins the story into what can only be described as cinematic poetry. Alternating from enormous, seductive 65-millimeter film for exterior sequences to more claustrophobic and hazy digital photography for ones set inside, Davies captures the lush majesty of northeastern Scotland's landscapes while also revealing to the audience the hardships endured by the peasantry beholden to this land. The myriad sublime moments include the opening introduction of Chris, rousing from a nap in a golden cornfield as if emerging from the earth itself, and a panoramic tour of a nightmarish battlefield tableau forlornly set to "The Flowers of the Forest."

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