A Curious Tale is a close cousin of a 50-minute 1972 BBC film entitled A Warning to the Curious (both based on the same MR James ghost story). This terse but tense film, directed by former punk rocker Leigh Tarrant, is set on Britain’s wild Sussex coast. The setting is steeped in history and features beautiful unspoiled natural landscapes. This is also a land of dark legends, and the particular legend connected to A Curious Tale is that of three crowns buried near the Sussex shoreline in 1588 supposedly to protect England from invasion. As we learn two of these crowns are no more—one was washed into the sea by erosion and the other dug up and stolen.
As the story goes, no archeologist who has ever tried to excavate the last crown has survived. Cut to the present and aging rock musician/amateur archeologist Rattlebone, who’s down at a local rural B&B in Sussex on holiday from recording an album and armed with geographical research he’s done on the remaining crown's whereabouts. Almost as soon as he begins his search for the crown in earnest, he begins to attract the attention of creepy-looking country folk who don’t seem too pleased with this shovel-wielding stranger in their midst. Like the old-school British folk-horror films A Curious Tale is based on, much of the action takes place during the day, with a lot of Hammer-style atmospheric gravitas driving the film’s creepy appeal.
It’s really when Rattlebone finds the crown that he finds himself properly haunted and soon puts it back in its original resting place to try and ward off whoever—angry spirits or perhaps ticked-off terrestrial beings (or both)—may now be stalking him. Clearly, the aging rocker knows too much now. Director Tarrant has deftly fashioned something like a nostalgic British TV horror drama here that relies on suggestion and gradual tension buildup rather than cheap jump scares or nihilistic blood and gore that seems to be the fashion these days.
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