What Josiah Saw
There are stories in town that the Graham farmstead out on Willow Road is haunted, most likely by the ghost of Miriam Graham who one day decided to hang herself from the old oak tree out front rather than go to church; her youngest son Tommy finding her swaying in the breeze, there is little doubt she was driven to it by her husband Josiah and the only sin of it was leaving her three children with no one to care for them but a man such as him.
Decades pass, and the family are broken, Eli an ex-convict living in a trailer home trying to pay off the gambling debts he owes to a dangerous man, his twin Mary and her husband smiling through adoption interviews while at home they argue and accuse each other while Thomas still lives under the shadow of his father, controlled by abuse and shame and driven by Josiah’s visions of Miriam burning in hell for his sins, telling his son that only by making atonement can his mother be redeemed.
The fields overgrown and windswept, great flocks of crows gathering on telegraph wires as a tractor sits in the yard held together by mud and rust, What Josiah Saw is shaped by the unbearable weight of the past and told in three segments, The Ghost of Willow Road focusing on the vision which prompts Josiah to give up his morning mug of whiskey, Eli and the Gypsies taking a tawdry dive into a sinister carnival which acts as a front for child trafficking and Mary May I which brings the strands together in an uncomfortable union.
Written by Robert Alan Dilts and directed by Vincent Grashaw, What Josiah Saw is a richly seasoned Southern Gothic stew of mysticism and manipulation starring Antlers‘ Scott Haze as Thomas, his own father mocking him as “the village idiot,” Carnivàle‘s Nick Stahl as Eli, trying to get out of trouble and only digging a deeper hole, Horns‘ Kelli Garner as Mary, only willing to return to sever the ties once and for all, and The X-Files‘ Robert Patrick as patriarch Josiah whose passion for punishing sin scarred them all.
Each segment a different setting and style, from the homespun torment of religious piety to the Lynchian absurdity of a small-time crime syndicate whose ambition turns to a tragic game of last man standing to the quiet suburban cul-de-sac where Mary thought she was safe other than the nightmares, they are part of a deformed whole, the curse of family as unrelenting as the umbilical cord which strangles the baby.
The past they tried to bury and leave behind about to be dug up by the interests of fracking company Devlin Oil, some of the reveals of What Josiah Saw are obvious but not all, the devil in the details of a family accomplished in the art of lying even to themselves, the two hour runtime carried by the sense of increasing desperation wrung from the ensemble and helped by the changing tone of the defined three-act structure which sees that old oak tree die from root to farthest branches.
What Josiah Saw will be streaming on Shudder from Thursday 4th August
