The Arborist had its world première at FrightFest, 8.25pm Sat 23 Aug
The Arborist opens with an irrational, nightmarish sequence. To the instantly recognisable sound of a crying baby, seven animal figurines are seen rotating on a mobile over an empty crib, while teen Wyatt Drummond (Hudson West) holds his baby sister Rachel in his arms on the nearby sofa, begging her to stop making noise. A strange sphere fashioned from thin, interwoven branches rolls into the room, and from behind it peeks a bird-like creature. The following morning Ellie (Lucy Walters) finds her daughter dead in the cot, and a terrified Wyatt hiding in that classic locus of secrecy, the closet. The official medical verdict is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, but Wyatt insists that a raven took Rachel.
This is the ‘primal scene’ of writer/director Andrew Mudge’s feature, although there are others, going much further back in time, which will entwine themselves around Ellie and Wyatt’s trauma like parasitic tendrils around a tree trunk. It is now a while later, and mother and son have not recovered from their grief and guilt. Ellie secretly drinks – although not so secretly as to escape her son’s notice – and dismisses the rituals of recovery recommended by her bereavement group. And Wyatt, still suffering from vivid nightmares, is damaged and vulnerable. To make some money, to get away from their house, maybe even to heal a little in nature, they take a job together on a huge private estate where old, cantankerous Arthur Randolph (Will Lyman) – the last living Randolph – now lives all alone.
It is, as Ellie is quick to observe, a peculiar assignment. She is an arborist, focused on preserving the health and safety of individual plants, but the work – chopping down trees for firewood – really requires a “feller with a millsaw”. And the chosen stand, situated around a long abandoned outdoor children’s theatre, is in very good health, while there are many other, older trees much closer to the house and far better suited for use as lumber. Yet as Ellie struggles to piece together, in both professional and more existential terms, what exactly she is doing there, Wyatt starts seeing those arboreal spheres and the raven again. Even if Ellie at first does not believe her increasingly out-of-control son, soon she too will sense that there is something else on this land invading their domestic psychodrama to rehearse and restage, through Wyatt, a much older injustice. With seven – eight really – ghosts in animal guise circling the proceedings like figurines on a mobile, Arthur must contend once again with the sin in his family, while Ellie and Wyatt must face the legacy of their own hidden family tree.
There is a scene in The Arborist where Ellie tells Wyatt about ‘wood wound’, which “heals up the tree like scar tissue,” but if it stops growing in, leaves the tree gradually to kill itself with festering damage that eats it from within. It is an obvious metaphor for the Drummonds’ inability to grow and move on from Rachel’s death, or for single, solitary Arthur still haunted by his own childhood history. For Mudge’s film, though certainly a ghost story and a folk horror, always clings to its psychological subtext, even as Wyatt’s rites of passage branch off between ordinary adolescent playing out and a psychopathy more deeply rooted in his very blood. This all comes so uncannily overdetermined that you cannot always see the wood for the trees – but like wild flora, families too, if maintained and at times judiciously pruned by an arborist, can rebranch and even thrive long into the future.
strap: Wound wood: Andrew Mudge’s ghost story/folk horror reflects guilt and trauma festering through a damaged family tree
© Anton Bitel
