★★★☆☆
EDITH WALKS (PG) THIS experimental part travelogue-part psychedelic odyssey – the third collaboration between director Andrew Kötting and author Iain Sinclair (following Swandown and By Our Selves) – takes us on a strange trip back in time via the present.
Across the brief hour-long feature, we follow the director and the author’s 108-mile journey on foot from Waltham Abbey in Essex to St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex and the startling sculpture that depicts King Harold being cradled by his handfast wife Edith Swan-Neck.
In tow they have an oddball group that includes a travelling drummer and a physical manifestation of Edith herself (as played by musician Claudia Barton). She provides a strong female presence — an ethereal, ghostly quality by her appearance and poetic, whispering narration evoking a modern Terrence Malick film.
There’s no getting around that it’s a peculiar film, unusually shot using a mixture of digital Super 8, on iPhones and impressive giant camera rigs to capture the foot journey and up-close-and-personal speeches.
It exhibits a distinct penchant for going off on quirky tangents that embrace the incidences and happenstance of their chosen journey, whether it be delving into “archive footage” of all-child battle re-enactments or a fairly lengthy conversation with acclaimed graphic novelist and author Alan Moore.
There’s an intriguing, if admittedly self-conscious, artifice about it that grabs hold of your attention from moment one. It has the rare advantage of being hard to place into any one category; is it a travelogue documentary? A passionate blending of fact and interpretation? A meditation on the nature of time, memory and the way human history is categorized and scoured over?
It feels like a wilfully scattershot combination of them all (and more) and entertaining the more you’re willing to go tag along with it every which way. It’s definitely not for everyone but offbeat and alluring in its own right.
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