The Cadaver Stone

HD video, 29:11, 2020

 

The Cadaver Stone begins in the quaint Cornish village of Port Isaac, where the filming of another episode of the feel-good TV drama Doc Martin is underway. Tourists mill about, extras wait in costume, as the familiar rhythms of  comfort TV unfold against the backdrop of the rugged coastline. It’s here, amid this choreographed normalcy, that the filmmaker and his guide, Duncan, set off on a  different narrative—a journey along a supposed ley-line stretching up the northern coast of Cornwall. Their route leads through ancient moorlands, stone circles, burial grounds, and eventually to a jagged beach in Devon, where the titular Cadaver Stone stands—rumoured to be the site of sacrificial rituals.

What starts as a casual travelogue slowly unravels into a tangle of hearsay, speculation, and half-truths. The Guide offers up local lore steeped in both the sacred and the mundane, and the filmmaker—equally drawn to these stories—begins to echo his guides logic. As the two progress along the increasingly crooked ley-line, the landscape itself seems to shift— warping and bending to the stories and interpretations. The stone monuments become vessels for belief, their meanings reshaped with every retelling. It’s unclear when facts begin to slip—perhaps they always were. The film’s structure mimics the shaky trust we place in our guides, in narratives and in our own desires to believe. What if this land, so romanticized in postcards and TV shows, remembers what it was long before it became a setting? Was the Cadaver Stone really used in blood rites? Or is it just another tall-tale conjured up for the film to have an ending (or title)? The journey becomes less about clear eyed discovery and more about the longing for something to be there—for the supernatural to assert itself.

By the end the film has shed most of its documentary pretense and the viewer is left wondering how much of the journey was real, and how much a performance not unlike an episode of Doc Martin: carefully framed, full of camaraderie, but ultimately fictional. The Cadaver Stone explores how belief fills the gaps in our knowledge, how folklore becomes a mirror for our fears and desires, and how the power of suggestion—of simply wanting something to happen—can bring the landscape to life.

 

 

Direction, Animation, Editing, Dialoge and the role of "Narrator":
Rustan Söderling

 

Aditional dialogue and the role of "Duncan":
Duncan Drury

Sound Design:
Alban Schelbert