How Did You Find Us?
Main Cast: Anthony Flanagan, Alistair Petrie
Director: Guy Soulsby
My first reaction after watching writer/director Guy Soulsby’s (A Sickness) 2018 horror short GOD’S KINGDOM was something like, “Okay, well that was a thing.”
So I watched it again (it’s only 23:21). Having seen it twice now, my reaction is … pretty much the same.
This felt long for a short, and it felt even longer for how little I got from it.
In this short, Jack (Anthony Flanagan, Doctor Who, House of the Dragon), a priest, is traveling with a young girl named Ella (Leah Rhodes). We don’t know their relationship to one another, we don’t know where they’re going or how they hooked up with each other on this journey.
In a subplot, a man, Alexander (Alistair Petrie, ROGUE ONE: A Star Wars Story), makes another man, David (Paul Hurtsfield, Doctors), dig his own grave, then Alexander hits David in the head with his shovel.
Meanwhile, Jack has stepped on a nail in a field, so they step into a roadside diner so he can tend to his wound. When he comes out of the bathroom, a woman is sitting at the table with Ella. Jack and the woman have it out in the diner, Jack asking how she found them.
Later, he and Ella make it to the farmhouse of Simon (Mark Wingett, East Enders, SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) who gives Jack a sawed-off shotgun and a car, but Jack and Ella don’t make it far before Alexander and his assistant confront them.
SPOILERS
We’re almost at the end and this is where we get into heavy spoiler territory, but since—spoilers again—I’m not recommending this one, I’ll go ahead and tell you what happens.
Back at the farmhouse, Jack has Simon read a passage from Revelations, which implies Ella is one of the angels sent to bring about the end of the world. Whether Alexander knows this or not, we don’t know, we just know he’s been ordered to get her. So they go to a field, Alexander and Robin with Jack and Ella in tow. Jack shoots Alexander, Robin shoots Jack, and Ella, seeing her protector lying dead, issues a scream that blackens the sky and sends down a pillar of fire to eradicate everything in the area, including herself and Robin.
Credits.
END SPOILERS
As I said, it’s a thing.
There’s no epilogue, no moral, no denouement, nothing. It just ends with the viewer getting no more details than what was on the screen. Which wasn’t much, because the dialogue in this thing is minimal considering the run time.
From a technical standpoint, GOD’S KINGDOM was very well-made. Anthony Flanagan is a very good actor who carried what little load this short had pretty well. The location—Yorkshire—looked dark and cold, lending atmosphere and mood to a script that was light on both. For me, the real star here was Robbie Drake, the special effects makeup artist who really did a number on Flanagan throughout the course of the short. Jack gets into one fight that we see, but as we go along, his injuries seem more and more severe, to the point I expected he and Simon had gotten into it and we just didn’t see it. But when we cut back to the farmhouse and Simon’s offering a sawed-off shotgun, they’re clearly not at odds.
But still, I was missing that MOMENT. You know that moment, the point in the story—sometimes a line of dialogue, sometimes a plot detail—that brings it all together and makes the story whole. I didn’t get that here.
In the end, my reaction is still the same: that was a thing. GOD’S KINGDOM was a thing I won’t remember in two months. And not because it wasn’t good. Again, it was WELL-made. The fight in the diner was exciting and fun, an excellent combination of choreography and editing. The music added tension and carried the scene where it needed to. The wound in Jack’s foot when he peels off his sock was gross and looked very painful. Overall, a very, technically, good short. But I didn’t have the MOMENT, and in something this short, with this complicated a plot—it feels like we’re only getting a second act of a much longer story here—you kinda need that MOMENT to bring it all together.
In the end, the Alter YouTube channel offers way more satisfying fare at a much shorter run time. See GOD’S KINGDOM if you MUST, but I’m not recommending you do. And if you DO, hopefully you got more out of it than I did. You can watch it free on YouTube.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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