I have a soft spot for seventies movies, but I can’t decide if The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is horror or not. I found it on a horror list, and an oblique reference to Lord of the Flies got me interested. It reminded me, in some ways, of The Wicker Man. Although based on a Japanese novel, the movie’s set in England. Two subplots seem unrelated except they happen to the same widowed mother and son. The son is part of a group of five boys in a private school who have a secret society (echoes of dark academia here). The leader, although not yet at puberty, is a sociopath who’s very bright and the others follow him. He declares that a perfect balance (a very East Asian religious outlook) exists that adults simply cannot realize it. Indeed, adults are bad.
At the same time, the boy’s mother meets and falls in love with a second-mate on a merchant ship. The boy likes the mate too and feels that they have found a perfect balance. Thus the two plots come together. The boys in the club feel that the son has gone soft on their principles, and so to prove he hasn’t they arrange the vivisection of an anesthetized cat. When the sailor returns, unexpectedly, to try to marry the widow, her son objects. The perfect balance has been distorted. The boys decide that the sailor must be treated “like the cat.” They take him to a distant overlook on a pretense, and drug him. In a long shot at the end, the boys gather around his unconscious body. Now, the similarities to The Wicker Man may seem passing, but the idea of human sacrifice is there.
Is this horror or not? Hard to say. Most of the movie revolves around the mother’s relationship with the sailor (which the son watches, voyeuristically, through a knothole in his bedroom cupboard. The secret society is always there, however, and when the plots come together you realize that the sailor will have to be killed. Like Wicker Man, there’s nothing really explicit here, although Wicker Man does have a horrific ending. The Sailor only has one by implication. The leader of the secret society of boys is pretty scary and apart from the widow, parents are pretty scarce in the movie. I was left wondering what it was that I’d just seen. I can see why someone would list it as horror, but it had other echoes that I felt might fit better. It was, however, free for the streaming.
