I’m trying to identify a rather obscure film I watched sometime in the mid-to-late 2000s. The film itself may be considerably older, probably from the 1990s or early 2000s, but possibly even earlier.
It was a dark, slow-paced drama, possibly British, Irish, Canadian, Australian, or another English-language production. It had a strange, slightly surreal atmosphere: a man arrives in or gets stranded in a remote small town and, as far as I remember, has difficulty leaving it.
For years I was convinced the main actor was Tim Roth, whom I had recently seen in Tarantino films at the time. However, I have checked his filmography and cannot find anything matching, so this is probably a false memory. The actor may simply have looked somewhat like Tim Roth. John Lynch has also been suggested, but I am not certain about him either.
Here are the scenes I remember quite clearly:
• The protagonist is shown a park or grove containing large, old trees. He is told that this is actually the town’s cemetery. When someone dies, seeds are placed in the dead person’s mouth before burial, and eventually a tree grows there and serves as their memorial.
• Later, either the protagonist or another living character wakes up in the morning and discovers seeds in their mouth. Given the burial custom shown earlier, this is obviously a very sinister threat.
• There is a somewhat mentally unstable or eccentric woman who has a son with some degree of intellectual/developmental disability. He is not profoundly disabled and can speak and interact normally enough.
• I remember a very specific dialogue between the woman and her son. He asks her where he came from. She tells him some beautiful, romantic story about how she found him or how he came into her life — something like the traditional “found in the cabbage patch” story, but more poetic.
The son then replies approximately:
“Some boys say you had me after you fucked a turtle/tortoise.”
And she answers approximately:
“One day they’ll wake up with their mouths sewn shut.”
These are translations from the dubbed version I watched, so the original English dialogue could be quite different. The animal may possibly have been something other than a turtle/tortoise.
• At some point it is revealed that the woman had been sexually abused/raped by her own father, and I believe her son was conceived as a result.
The whole film was gloomy, strange and deliberately slow. I didn’t particularly enjoy it when I first watched it because of the slow pacing, but several scenes have stayed in my memory for nearly twenty years.
The atmosphere reminded me somewhat of the Soviet film “Zero City” (Gorod Zero / City Zero): an outsider finds himself trapped in a bizarre provincial community whose customs and behavior become increasingly disturbing.
Suggestions I’ve already checked or that have been proposed:
-
The Sweet Hereafter (1997) — not it.
-
The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978) — probably not it.
-
Driftwood (1997, with James Spader) — apparently not it.
-
The Quarry — not it.
-
I cannot find a matching Tim Roth film.
The strongest details I’m confident about are the cemetery made up of trees, the custom of putting seeds into the mouths of the dead, the living character waking up with seeds in their mouth, and the mother/son dialogue about his origins and someone’s mouth being sewn shut.
Does this sound familiar to anyone?