Fanny Lye Deliver'd

England under Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century. A woman named Fanny Lye lives on a farm with her husband and son. Humble and God-fearing, she is soon to be saved from the shackles of a puritanical life thanks to a pair of libertines who show up at her house, fleeing the ruthless long arm of the law. In Fanny Lye Deliver’d, Thomas Clay discusses the formation of radical new attitudes regarded as shameful but heralding future norms. Although on-screen events are set at a specific moment in the past, the whole has little in common with typical period pieces. Clay’s film is an eccentric hybrid with elements of a folk horror and a home-invasion thriller. The film’s formal layer also works to achieve this peculiar effect—it is a big-time pastiche of audiovisual conventions from about the 1970s that manages to seem both archaic and modern at the same time.