Lawrie Brewster’s The Reign of Queen Ginnarra begins with a ballad about said queen, and a text quote from H.P. Lovecraft, so that when the ballad’s lyrics describe Ginnarra as “prophet of the Old Ones, mistress of the dark”, we know that her fantasy realm is directly linked to the imaginative worlds of the late horror author. For Ginnarra (Megan Tremethick) has established a cult for the gods of the abyss, and regularly offers them human sacrifice to secure her own powerbase of sorcery and necromancy, while trying to establish her son Raemin (Dorian Todd), gifted to her by the infernal deities, as sole heir to her throne.
Much as this mother is a cruel torturer, patricide, would-be fratricide and unflinching infanticide, her similarly sadistic son, product of a god-sent virgin birth, is an antichrist – in a topsy-turvy world where worship of powerful interdimensional demons is thoroughly mainstreamed, and where Christianity is marginalised and considered heretical. When the Friar (Adam Barnett) who heads the nearby monastery (and the rebellion against Ginnarra’s reign) expresses saintlike forgiveness for the very Queen who has martyred him and is savouring his painful death, she looks on him with utter incomprehension. It is not just that she is irredeemable, but that she has no desire to be redeemed. She has already willingly sold her soul to the devil – or to Lovecraftian beasts – and forgiveness is, for her, an utterly alien concept.
Although Ginnarra is not only foregrounded in the film’s title, but also mentioned and even seen in an extended introductory prologue, she does not emerge as an actual character until a good half an hour into a film whose length matches its epic ambitions. Before that the focus is on her fugitive brother Prince Elderon (Andrew Gourlay), still grieving the death of his father at Ginnarra’s treacherous hands, and evading the Black Claw guards that she keeps sending to murder him. Elderon is something of a Hamlet figure: a prince handy enough with a sword though no superhero, and ever hesitant to shoulder the burden of a destiny that frightens him. That Jesus-like destiny, imparted to him by an otherworldly Seer (Craig J. Seath), involves betrayal from one close to him, and his own eventual death. As he reluctantly accepts the title of King and leads a small band of rebels – novice priest with a dark past Elias (Sam Barclay) and experienced fighter Regis (Shadi El Dah) – directly against the Queen who knows that he is coming, strange magic and cosmic forces circle both sides of this timeless conflict between good and evil.
An obvious influence here is John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), both because of all the swords and sorcery in a Dark Ages setting, and because there is something of Arthur, Morgana and Mordred in the toxic triangle formed by Elderon, Ginnarra and Raemin (in a film where the triangle is the ubiquitous symbol of Ginnarra’s infernal church) – even as the Seer subs for Merlin. Both films are also exactly 141 minutes in duration. Yet where Boorman was juggling a budget of some $11 million, Brewster’s vision has been realised for far less, helped by CG dragons and some AI-enhanced imagery.
The battle sequences, and indeed all the crowd scenes, are presented as hyperreal tableaux vivants in montage – and Ginnarra, too, is typically presented as a static figure in elaborate costume and makeup, sitting impassively on her throne or barely moving about her private underground chapel, and saying very little – but striking palpable fear with her every word. Hers is a reign of poses and gestures, as though she were as much a portrait of legendary tyranny as the living breathing reality, with the fabled terror that she embodies always understated – and the more menacing for that.
Where the set-piece spectacles are stylised as the minimally mobile pages of a storybook, what is shot more conventionally is Elderon’s journey, his stay in the monastery, and his movements in the shadowy labyrinth under the palace. He is a rather anaemic hero, his predicted fate more interesting than his actual fulfilment of it, which makes the film’s considerable length at times feel overstretched, even if it comes with the genre. It is also somewhat troubling, in this most Manichaean of succession dramas, to see evil mapped as female, and the restoration of the late king’s male heir (and so of patriarchy) figured as the film’s happily every after – even if misogyny may be the very last reason to oppose Ginnarra’s ruthless, wilfully vicious reign, and to celebrate its end.
All this is, perhaps, a reflection both of the dark times in which the film is set, and of our own supposedly more enlightened times where, once again, women are being stripped of power and pushed back into the rôle of trad wife/mother by both the imperatives of the religious right (now that Christianity has come back out of the shadows) and a surreal demonisation of DEI. Myth is always a stage on which the preoccupations of the present can be played out at a distance – and in the uneven battle of the sexes (as well as between despotism and resistance) rehearsed during The Reign of Queen Ginnarra, everything is questioned, no one really triumphs, nothing really changes and only death is the ultimate equaliser.
strap: Lawrie Brewster’s stylised swords-and-sorcery succession saga plays out present preoccupations (with power and gender) in a Lovecraftian dark age
© Anton Bitel
