In the Flesh: The Sudbury Devil

There’s so much passion and attention to detail evident in every scene of Andrew Rakich’s The Sudbury Devil, such evident love of film and history, and such respect for the real people who lived in the depths of the past. It’s hard to care about cut-rate special effects and the absence of professional lighting when the production has so much talent in the wings and such a keen and clear artistic vision. From Goodenow’s (Matthew Van Gessel) bulging, Gollum-like eyes to the lyrical beauty of the film’s period-accurate script, it’s clear the film’s architects have a real aesthetic vision for their work. Add Dillon M. DeRosa’s seething, nightmarish dark ambient score and Rakich’s considerable editing chops and the film’s budgetary limitations seem less and less important until, like the painted backdrops in I, Claudius, you simply stop thinking about them. 

Rakich’s script reads like Puritanism’s answer to the lapsed Catholic’s crisis of faith, his characters tormented by their own hypocrisy, animated by spite and zeal, seething with repressed desires and indulgent fantasies. There’s no intrusion of modern values into this story, no lesson to be taken from the depravity of the witch Patience Gavett (Linnea Gregg) or the self-loathing brutality of colonial soldier John Fletcher (Benton Guinness), our first glimpse of whom shows him blowing like a bull through a mask of blood and spit as he prepares to face down a Wampanoag brave (Drew Shuptar-Rayvis) on the field of battle. His later recounting of the battle and ensuing raids to the satanic Mr. Gavett (Rakich himself, clearly having the time of his life) is a ghastly colonial nightmare straight out of Apocalypse Now! or Blood Meridian, concluding with a brief, brutal line on the bounty on Wampanoag heads and the difference in weight between a child’s skull and an adult’s.

The film’s thesis on sex as the shadow of violence is fascinatingly deployed. Fletcher is lauded for his vicious past to such an extent that he has been elevated to the rank of magistrate by his community, but his sexual urges — which, notably, target the same groups as his violent ones — are verboten, instantly stripping him of his rank and status in the eyes of fellow magistrate Josiah Cutting (Josh Popa). He rapes escaped indentured worker Flora (Kendra Unique Wills) and has intercourse with Patience Gavett as they stab one another repeatedly, a union of his life’s conflicting forces which results in the birth of the film’s titular devil, a horned apparition straight out of the Ars Goetia, which a dying Fletcher entreats to torment Sudbury for all time with plagues, violence, and misfortune. It’s a savagely brutal view of what Puritanism has to offer, and of the routes to freedom outside its societal model. There’s no escape from colonialism’s brutal horrors in the film’s depiction of witchcraft and Satanic worship, no egalitarian society of women living free, only a bigger, nastier tyrant and a kingdom far older and more honest in its hateful need for dominance.