Roddy McDowall—yes, the guy from Planet of the Apes—decided he wanted to direct a movie. And what we got was Tam-Lin (also known as The Ballad of Tam-Lin, The Devil’s Widow, or Why the Hell Did I Sit Through This?). On paper, it’s folk horror: witches, enchantments, a Scottish ballad, pagan rituals. In practice? It’s two hours of Ava Gardner swanning around in haute couture while Ian McShane looks like he’s trying to figure out how to chew through the script and escape.
The premise is juicy enough: Gardner plays Michaela, a wealthy older woman who keeps a pack of beautiful young things around her like decorative vases. She’s particularly obsessed with Tom (a smoldering Ian McShane), but his libido inconveniently points him toward Janet, a sweet vicar’s daughter who is more “countryside milkmaid” than “occult cougar.” Naturally, Gardner’s Michaela doesn’t take rejection well, and revenge is promised. Sounds like gothic gold, right? Wrong. It’s less “folk horror” and more “extended Gucci perfume ad filmed in Scotland.”
The pacing moves slower than a funeral march in quicksand. By the time the supposed supernatural vengeance starts to bubble, you’re already wishing the Devil would show up just to put everyone—and the audience—out of their misery. McDowall’s direction is soaked in 1960s psychedelia, meaning endless shots of people looking vaguely stoned, wandering around country houses in billowy costumes, while Pentangle strums folk songs in the background. There’s even an LSD sequence shot in infrared film, which is supposed to feel trippy but looks like a bad acid flashback at a student art exhibit.
The “horror” is nonexistent. The scariest thing in Tam-Lin is realizing you’re still only halfway through it. Gardner, magnificent as ever, is wasted here—reduced to vamping around like a bitter socialite who accidentally wandered into a Hammer film. McShane spends most of his screen time brooding shirtless in meadows, which is fine if you like shirtless meadow brooding, but as a narrative engine it sputters like a dead lawnmower. Poor Stephanie Beacham as Janet barely registers, a blank canvas of innocence meant only to give Tom someone pure to knock up before the witch gets mad.
And let’s talk about that ending. After all the moody pagan buildup, Gardner’s grand revenge is… what, exactly? Some vague enchantment nonsense, a chase sequence that looks like it was edited with garden shears, and then everybody just sort of drifts off. The film doesn’t climax—it dissolves, like a sugar cube in lukewarm tea.
Final Verdict:
Tam-Lin is less a horror film and more an overlong fashion spread with a ghost of a plot wandering through it. It wants to be Rosemary’s Baby meets Wicker Man, but instead it’s just Harper’s Bazaar: Witchcraft Edition. If folk horror is supposed to unnerve you with primal dread and ancient fears, this one only unnerves you with the creeping suspicion that your popcorn’s gone stale. Ava Gardner deserved better. Ian McShane deserved better. Hell, even Pentangle deserved better.
Watching Tam-Lin is like drinking herbal tea when you were promised whiskey: weak, tepid, and only slightly hallucinatory if you stare at it long enough.
