★★★★

THERE are several scenes of sun-dappled Highland splendour in Terence Davies’s adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbons novel, and each should be cherished like a spring day. For while Davies’ film is beautiful, utterly, heartbreakingly so at times , it is as bleak as war and night as it charts the life and times of farmer’s daughter Chris Guthrie, a Scottish heroine if ever there was one. 

Manchester-born actress Agyness Deyn plays the lassie who dreams of becoming a teacher but for whom fate has other plans. Her early years are full of watching another woman, her mother (Daniela Nardini), suffer at the hands of her brutish father (Peter Mullan). Quietly determined that there must be a summer to life as well as a winter, Chris ploughs on. 

Deyn makes a deeply moving, intensely noble Chris, her Scots accent barely wavering as she goes through the emotional wringer. And there are fine performances too from Mullan, Nardini and later Kevin Guthrie as the man who burrows into Chris’s heart. 

Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, Of Time and the City) brings his trademark lyricism to the tale, and, of course, there is singing aplenty. While one knew Britain’s Malick would look kindly on the Scottish landscape he has surpassed himself here with scene after scene of colour, majesty and melancholy. Sunset Song, as well as being a hymn to Scottish womanhood, is a psalm in praise of the land, its power, beauty and wrath, and Davies has done the novel, and Scotland, proud.