Music of ethereal beauty, painterly images that evoke the ethos of a bygone era: there is no mistaking the look and feel of a Terence Davies film. Turning to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s eponymous 1932 novel set in rural Scotland during the Great War, Davies has made what is perhaps his most epic and sublime film to date.

Peasant girl Chris Guthrie (elegantly embodied by the beautiful British model and actress Agyness Deyn) is our first-person heroine, narrating Sunset Song as a memoir. While toiling on the family farm under the close watch of her tyrannical father (the great Scottish character actor Peter Mullan), Chris finds romance with her handsome young neighbor Ewan. But tragedy swoops in: war is declared, Ewan is called away to fight, and somewhere in the midst of it all his character destroyed.

Davies’ most singular gift is his ability to rapturously recreate the tone, texture and rhythm of a time and a place very different from our modern world. Every frame of Sunset Song bears the fruits of this mastery, yet, just as importantly, the film also conveys the human heart in its eternal ricochet between resilience and fragility. – Jaie Laplante