The Navigator 2001 Horror Movie Review

Vincent Ward’s mystical tale of a tiny 14th-century English hamlet during the devastation of the Black Plague mixes faith and fantasy in a compelling adventure. Ward creates a stark look with his high contrast black-and-white photography: dark huts against a snow-covered landscape and a gray sky, candles and campfires burning tiny pools of light in the midnight-black caves. The visions of young Griffin (Hamish McFarlane) break this austere style with color dreams, at first merely flashes of images, then a vivid narrative of a pilgrimage through the center of the earth. Griffin’s older brother Connor (Bruce Lyons), who has just returned from the dying, diseased cities of England, leads this great journey to an alien world of metal beasts and towering ramparts (revealed as a modern New Zealand city) to make their offering to God. Ward keeps the camera tied to their experience, creating a nightmarish vision of familiar objects and locations: a busy highway, a junkyard, a remarkable run-in with a surfacing submarine. Throughout, Griffin’s haunting flashes of the future taunt him with clues to a death in the party, but they don’t reveal who. The Navigator defies genre, mixing fantasy and science fiction, religion and mysticism, historical realism and modern adventure, to create a compelling, beautiful, visually stunning leap of faith. —Sean Axmaker