Culling
2021 · 13m · United Kingdom
Directed by Matty Crawford
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
A young man tries to save a cow from slaughter, whilst two boys trawl through treacherous and desolate terrain, escaping an invisible threat.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Culling wants to be a parable about complicity and survival but hedges its bets with dual narratives that cancel each other out—the cow-rescue thread is actually the interesting one, and Crawford doesn't have the guts to commit to it.
Crawford channels the formal restraint of folk-horror tradition while keeping the frame deliberately flat and observational; there's a lineage here—British pastoral unease, the unseen menace—executed with considerable discipline and compositional control.
The genius move is keeping the invisible threat truly invisible and letting the sound design carry the dread while the image stays mundane and rural; that refusal to clarify or show is what makes thirteen minutes feel airless.