The Wicker Man (1973) occupies a peculiar position in British cinema: a box-office failure on release that somehow accrued enough cult gravity to warp everything around it, spawning a fetish culture as strange as the film itself. Any documentary circling that orbit has two jobs — anatomise the film's strange production history and afterlife, and say something true about the man who made it. Children of the Wicker Man, a collaboration between Robin Hardy's sons Justin and Dominic, tries to do both simultaneously, using the grief of two estranged children as its primary instrument. The ambition is correct. The execution is partial. The production history angle is well-trodden territory. Allan Brown's Inside The Wicker Man and multiple long-form journalism pieces have already charted the studio interference, the truncated cuts, the slow cult rehabilitation. The documentary adds texture through the family angle — the financial wreckage The Wicker Man's failure visited on Justin's mother, who was effectively bankrupted by it, is genuinely new context that reframes the film's misfortune as something with specific human casualties. That Justin simmers with clenched rage throughout is not a performance; it is the result of a father who walked out of his life as a child, leaving him and a sister to be raised by an alcoholic, financially ruined mother. The film earns every frame where that anger surfaces. Dominic, raised by a different mother in Canada, occupies a different emotional register — more forgiving, more historically inclined, the art historian's detachment smoothing the edges of wounds he experienced at greater geographic remove. The contrast between the brothers is the documentary's most interesting structural element, though it goes largely unexamined. The film notices the difference between them without ever pressing it hard enough to produce insight. What haunts the film — and not in the productive, atmospheric sense — is what isn't in it. Robin Hardy himself is dead. Anthony Shaffer is dead. Five of Justin and Dominic's siblings are absent without explanation. Allan Brown, who has done more archival work on The Wicker Man than almost anyone and is mentioned in several promising anecdotes, is cited but not interviewed. In his place, there is a substantial interview with Bill Paterson, a Scottish actor who was almost cast in the original film and wasn't. This is a structurally strange decision that the film never accounts for. It is the documentary equivalent of a biography that spends three chapters on someone who nearly met the subject. The small vignette where Dominic goes missing during filming and Justin is seen raging at producers is the most alive the documentary gets — partly because it is genuinely funny, partly because it is unguarded in a way the more formal interview segments aren't. It suggests the more interesting, messier film that might have been made if the brothers had been willing to train the camera on their own dynamic as relentlessly as on their father's legacy. That film, about two half-brothers processing different wounds through the same inadequate father-shaped object, would have been something. This one is partial testimony, delivered honestly but incompletely.
