The Fairy Moon had its world première at Fantasia 2025, 27th July
When Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) came out, I recall my boyish excitement at being able to catch up later with the previous two films in the series. Yet within its brief duration, The Fairy Moon manages to incorporate not one but three kinds of irrational encounter, and even structures itself around them with three formally headed sections (in Old English, with the subtitled translations ‘speak’, ‘touch’ and ‘dance’). All concern the escalating brushes between Roger Langford (Johnny Vivash) and a peculiar trickster (James Swanton).
When we first meet Roger, he is standing at the edge of a road, evidently immobilised by the anxiety and panic which, though unexplained, are written all over his face. As if in physical manifestation of Roger’s psychological state, Swanton’s well-dressed if peculiar character, credited only as ‘Syd’, appears behind Roger’s shoulder, and says calmly into his ear, “Imagine if I just pushed you into the road.” Deeply unnerved by this sinister madman, Roger flees, but an idea has now been implanted in Roger’s imagination, and over the course of the film, during two subsequent visits to that same roadside, he will meet Syd again, and come ever closer to the horrific scenario that Syd has suggested.
Roger will also encounter Syd elsewhere – sensing, if not quite seeing, his alarming presence in a bookstore, and in a cafe, and later, back home at night in his cottage, where, though alone, he becomes so convinced that he has glimpsed “a reflection of a figure of a man” out in his garden that he will call 999. With some audible amusement (and just a little menace), the operator (voiced by Julia Davis) will remind him that with “the moon, the time of year”, it is “just one of those nights when things get a bit, I don’t know, witchy.”
Certainly that sense that there is something uncanny, something fey and otherworldy, going on is reinforced both by this short film’s very title, and by the unmistakable image of Syd on each of the film’s three intertitles, in a hand-drawn profile representing him as the bearded god Pan complete with devilish goat’s horn. There is also, hanging on the wall of Roger’s home, a prominent illustration of Pan playing on his pipes to a stag.
Yet at the same time, it is possible to discern that Roger – who hears voices and imagines furniture moving by itself, who conflates the outdoor sounds of foxes rutting with Syd’s maniacal cackle, who conjures a living embodiment of the numinous figure from the reproduction on his wall, who wonders aloud if it is “really the police” to whom he is speaking on the phone, and who sleeps at the table with a knife in his hand – may be experiencing a psychotic breakdown, indeed a panic attack, and may himself be the danger to anyone else near him at that roadside threshold where The Fairy Moon begins.
Either way, Roger is ‘away with the fairies’. Casper Sellen’s unnerving choral track elevates Roger’s unravelling doom as though it were part of an ancient ritual. Writer/director Craig Williams – here spotted briefly entering a shop complaining about drummers – follows up his Welsh-language debut The Wyrm of Bwlch Pen Barras (2023) with a weird tale of small-town English paranoia, alienation and dread, collaborating once again with DP Sean Price Williams (no relation), whose cinematography brings the creepy textures of a British public information film, or perhaps a televised ghost story, from the Seventies. For in this looping, liminal short, the mere imagining of an ominous close encounter (or three) inevitably leads to its actualisation, and to someone dying or dead in the road. As to who, how and why, those are mysteries for the priest or the psychiatrist to resolve.
strap: Roadside attraction: in Craig Williams’ uncanny, uneasily funny short film, a panicked man is made to picture doom across the threshold
© Anton Bitel
