Director Andrew Baird’s phantasmal horror thriller Sunrise brings vampiric vengeance to bigotry in a small town. Set in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (but shot in the woods of Northern Ireland), the film centers on an Asian family who’ve come to a decaying industrial area. The town is ruled by Joe Reynolds (Guy Pearce), a violent patriarch of a family known for criminal activities and unfriendly to newcomers. He is especially intolerant of other races and ethnicities and makes it quickly known to Yan Loi (Crystal Yu) and her husband (Chike Chan) that they should not plan to stay in the town.
After the death of her husband, Yan is intent on standing up to John Reynolds, with little chance of succeeding, if not for the appearance of a stranger named Fallon (Alex Pettyfer) she winds up taking in. Fallon is quickly revealed to be the supernatural force of the film. While he’s a stranger to the Loi family, he is known to John Reynolds as the police officer they murdered some years before, along with his wife Clare (Tamara Chanel White), because she was not a White American. Fallon appears as a creature who feeds on blood and has preternatural strength and speed when he’s at full strength. He is never called a vampire. Instead of naming him as such, he is thought to be a manifestation of a forest-dwelling spirit of vengeance called The Redcoat. Though Fallon has been brought back to this world seemingly for vengeance, he focuses his energies on protecting Yan and her family. Young Emily Loi shows Fallon affection and concern particularly. Her kindness reminds him of his connection to humanity, and he seems to recover something that had been lost in himself.
Reynolds is driven on and fueled in his bigotry by Ma Reynolds (Olwen Fouéré), who makes it clear early on in a conversation with Mr Loi that they are neither reasonable nor good people. She seems proud of this fact. The Reynolds family fit right into the MAGA-fabulous wave of White supremacy sweeping the U.S. just now. John Reynolds tries to bully Mr. Loi into signing over their property and leaving town, but when Loi refuses, Reynolds kills him in a fit of rage. As the film proceeds, Reynolds often refers to an ideal about the White man that sounds a lot like Manifest Destiny and blends it with religious fervor to justify his vile actions.
“…Fallon is the police officer they murdered some years before…”
The film is shot in darkness and mist for the most part, providing moody atmospherics. There are frequent cuts to scenes of nature when the action is intense, as a visual reference to the natural world serving up the Redcoat as a balancing force versus Reynolds’ industrial and spiritual destruction of the land.
Screenwriter Ronan Blaney says (according to The Austin Chronicle) that the xenophobia of the Reynolds clan came from what he’d observed during the time of the troubles in Northern Ireland. They are “small-minded, puritanical people with very specific, extreme thinking who are very afraid of anything outside of that.”
Sunrise eschews exposition and explanation, with Baird focused more on the events at hand than world-building or dwelling on the mystic origins of the Redcoat. We get just enough backstory to understand what’s happening, but much remains shrouded in mystery, which works well.
Pearce and Pettyfer both deliver powerhouse performances. Despite this being a lower-budget film, Guy Pearce chews the scenery with sound and fury equal to anything else he’s done. He’s always amazing, and here he inhabits John Reynolds with a violent brutality that is thrilling to see. Pettyfer also steps up impressively. His portrayal of Fallon is reminiscent of Christopher Lambert in the old The Highlander film.
Sunrise borrows ideas from films like The Highlander and The Crow, with a seasoning of Billy Jack in the mix. The result is something entirely new.
"…vampiric vengeance to bigotry"
