Born in Huddersfield, the director Chris Cronin and the writer Paul Thomas draw up their film, “The Moor,” as a cinematic exposition of their childhood anxieties surrounding the moorland of their hometown. The film initially evokes the momentum of a slow-burn thriller but uses that as a springboard to settle into the modes of folk horror. The film is best understood in relation to the century-old history and myths surrounding the prominent moorlands of Europe. The discovery of the remains of the Lindow man, the standing stones, and the chilling Moor Murders – all become a key part of the narrative and aesthetic vocabulary of the film.
The Moor (2023) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
In Yorkshire ’96, a little boy and a slightly older girl plan a heist in a candy store. It is actually the girl, Claire, who coaxes her little friend, Danny, to divert the shopkeeper’s attention while she whisks away her treasure. However, Danny fizzles into thin air and is never found again. The shopkeeper tells Claire that a man has taken him. The disappearance of several other children haunt the Yorkshire town for the next 25 years.
Twenty-five years later, Claire meets Danny’s father, who is still looking for answers about the disappearance of his boy. Bill seeks Claire’s help to amplify his fight for justice. He wants Claire to include Danny’s story in her podcast. Bill is sure that Danny is buried in the moor. Claire agrees to accompany him on his moor-surveying journey. With the help of a moor ranger friend, Liz, Bill, and Claire traverse the crushingly dreary landscape of the peat moors.
Summer of fear
“Personally, I think that they just didn’t want to see that place out of their window anymore.”
Claire interviews several locals, including the police in charge of the time, for her podcast, who recount the horrors of that summer when children were whisked away without anyone noticing. Known as the ‘Summer of Fear,’ the several accounts of children being kidnapped and murdered triggered the most primal parental fear and exacerbated the atmosphere of paranoia. The moor, which never really bothered anyone hitherto, became the eye of the storm as the police directed its search operation there.
Claire meets the police officer and lays out a map of the moor. She shows him the place on the map where Bill is surveying. The police officer says he cannot recognize any of the places on the map. Noticing that he has confused Claire with his answer, he lays out several other maps that cover his entire floor and calls that entire cartographic area the moor. With a daunting geography like that, the odds of finding a dead body were never good, the officer explains.
What does Claire find in the moor?
On their next visit to the moor, Claire wears a bodycam. She is baffled to find some sheep. In one of the caveats, she finds a child’s abandoned shoe. Walking across the peat tires Claire, who seems to be falling under the grasp of anxiety surrounding the oppressive nature of the peat. On their way out, Bill finds a neolithic stone with a symbol of concentric circles carved on it. When Liz assures them that they are indeed on their way out, Claire is even more confused as she does not remember encountering the stone when they are heading inside.
Claire refuses to engage with the moor as she feels it is spreading its control over her and starts running. Claire’s mind conjures up the image of Danny from their childhood waiting for her in their alleyway. Claire sees a stranger approach Danny, but as she tries to run towards him, someone puts up a plastic bag on her head. She wakes up in her bed and realizes it was a nightmare.
How is Alex’s psychic ability put to use to find Danny?
Alex, a local, agrees to join Bill’s quest to find his son. He employs a divination skill much used in occultism—Dowsing. Alex explains that for Dowsing to succeed, he needs an object that is immensely important in Danny’s life. The dowsing pendulum then picks up the vibration and directs Alex to what he is searching for. Bill says that he got help from Alex’s psychic powers to determine where to search in the neverending moor.
On Bill’s insistence, Alex focussed on Danny’s objects, but instead, they were directed to the missing shoe of a different child. When Alex tells Bill that he cannot be of more help, he suggests that he should talk to Alex’s daughter, who is more talented with her psychic abilities. Alex’s daughter, Eleanor, uses dowsing and shows them a new place on the map.
What happens when Eleanor visits the moor?
Bill brings Eleanor to the moor. Claire, Bill, Eleanor, Alex, and Liz venture into the moorland. Alex explains to Claire that Eleanor is always eager to use her psychic power to help people. However, employing her psychic powers in cases of unnatural death proves detrimental to her well-being. Eleanor senses that the moor is turning hostile, as it does not want them there.
She establishes a connection with a child’s spirit who directs her to the same crater where the shoe was found. Eleanor passes out, and Bill starts digging in the place. It turns out that the place hid the body of the child to whom the shoe belonged. The police begin their search to find the bodies hidden in the moor.
In their next session, Eleanor says she has established a connection with the spirit. It is a protective guardian spirit named Thomas. The bond between Thomas and Eleanor allows Eleanor to look into the unknown. When a door needs to be opened with psychic abilities, Thomas is the key that enables Eleanor to open the door just enough so that she can take a glimpse and close it when the otherworldly voices become overbearing. Eleanor explains that this spirit does not speak to her but speaks through her.
Eleanor suggests that he might be the only one who knows what the moor hides. Alex suggests that while Eleanor summons Thomas, it is best to look away. Thomas says that the voices of children cannot be heard. The three notice that the map which has been laid out on the table is getting drenched with water. The pendulum shows them a place, and Bill is ready to go out again in search of Danny. Claire says Danny is alone in the place, but Eleanor replies that he is not alone.
On their next visit to the moor, a storm announces itself as a curveball, forcing them to set up a tent in the middle of nowhere. Eleanor says she can sense that Thomas is nervous. Claire feels that she has been here before. As Bill and Liz leave the tent to see the weather, Bill believes he has spotted someone and starts running towards it. However, he finds no one and falls into a peat bog.
Inside the tent, Claire opens up to Eleanor about her guilt revolving around Danny’s disappearance. Eleanor is about to say something about Claire but is interrupted by Alex’s arrival, who seems frozen. Moreover, Eleanor gets scared as Thomas has left her with the door to the otherworld open. Liz tries to seek help, but the signal captures messages from the otherworld. Ellie gets possessed by a spirit which sucks the life out of her. Alex, Bill, and Liz notice that a flock of blind sheep are fencing their tent in a circle.
The following day, Liz finds that instead of the flock of sheep, a Stonehenge-like formation has appeared around their tent. Eleanor’s body is evacuated with the help of a chopper. Following Eleanor’s death, Liz terminates her association with Bill. That night, the police in charge calls Claire and warns her not to go back to the moor. In fact, there is something inexplicable about the weather, and the imprisoned man somehow managed to slip away.
The Moor (2023) Movie Ending Explained:
Is the moor haunted?
In the final moments, it is the point of view of Claire’s bodycam through which we see the moor. Claire is brought to the moor once again by Bill, this time at gunpoint. She witnesses the horrible sight of a sheep running and collapsing against one of the stone columns. Bill explains that the moor has been a site of sacrifice since the Stone Age.
In the Stone Age, people were brought to the moor, where they were buried and suffocated to appease the evil. The moor houses an evil power that can only be appeased through human sacrifices. Bill believes that Danny was brought here as an offering to the evil, but it was never meant to be him. Bill then goes on to proclaim that during their stay in the tent, the evil power communicated to him that it had always wanted Claire as a sacrifice.
After a while, Bill directs his gun at Claire and shoots someone over her shoulder. Her camera records someone running through the mist with Bill running behind. Claire, too, runs behind Bill but falls into a bog. As the bog slowly pulls her down, Bill stands there as a passive witness to Claire getting consumed by the dead bog. Several dead bodies rise from the bog and reach out to her. Before the bog swallows her entirely, Claire catches the sight of Bill reuniting with Danny.
Yearning for a reunion with his ghost son, Bill readily sacrifices Claire. There is a point in the tent where Claire confesses to harboring survivor’s guilt for years and obsessively ruminating about Bill turning against her. In the end, Bill does turn against her. The reunion of Bill and the ghost of Danny may or may not be real– being only a fragment of the guilt-inundated imagination of Claire– but no attempt is ever made to explain the supernatural development. The narrative opens by posing two questions: the unresolved disappearances of the children along with the identity of the killer and the ‘truth’ of the moorland. However, by the end, the latter finds a predominance despite an open ending.
![I Trapped the Devil [2019] Review: An unengaging genre film serving as an allegory for alienation](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/I-trapped-The-Devil_HOF-768x324.jpg)