The Cinematheque

“An important lynchpin in Davies’s career and a mysterious and sometimes beautiful object in its own right … Communicates a complex sense of calm, quiet, experience, memory, time, and isolation.”

Adrian Danks, Senses of Cinema

Having pushed his highly controlled yet free-associative style to its zenith in The Long Day Closes, Terence Davies turned for the first time to a continuous narrative in his adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible. Jacob Tierney (now known for his TV direction) is David, the young, inward-drawn protagonist; the great Gena Rowlands is his aunt Mae, a former nightclub singer with nowhere else to go but home. Often disregarded—Davies internalized its reception and called it a failure—the film is a key transitional work. The film has many familiar Davies elements, but is set in the evangelical Bible Belt of the southern US. The Alabama-born critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, ​“It’s astonishing in how many ways Davies gets the details right,” referring to the hypnotic town rituals led by preachers and other patriarchs. Although the film is faithfully literary, it also marks the starting point of some of Davies’s most iconic inventions, as in its uncanny time leap.

“An extraordinary experience in which the familiar is made deeply and effectively unsettling … Rowlands seems to have been born to play Mae … If you can look at [her performance] in different ways, you can also look at the film’s ending in different ways.”

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times