NORTH WEST 01 - THE EATING OF SIN

FILM SYNOPSIS

1630: a desperate young widow named Isabelle responds to a grim job notice in a remote nearby parish: to eat a meal over the body of one recently deceased; a request for a 'Sin Eater'.

Upon her arrival, Isabelle is met by Alice, an austere old crone and fresh widow of the deceased in question. Alice is immediately unsettled to find that the respondent of her notice is not a hardened outcast, but a fair young woman barely in her twenties. As the pair sit before the hearth in the dying light, Isabelle calmly assures Alice she is familiar with the work and has seen the ritual performed before. Recognising the quiet desperation of a fellow widow, Alice reluctantly allows Isabelle to proceed.

Before nightfall, Alice warns Isabelle of the gravity of the job at hand. A Sin Eater consumes bread and ale over the corpse, symbolically taking the sins of the dead upon themselves so the soul may pass unburdened. But crucially, there is one unbreakable rule. The Sin Eater must know nothing of the deceased. For should the Sin Eater harbor even the slightest hatred or contempt for the deceased, the ritual will fail, and the Sin Eater will be damned.

That night, the ritual begins. Alice recites the ancient rites as Isabelle takes bread and ale over the body. All the while strange disturbances ripple through the room as the ceremony unfolds, and one particular line in the rite lingers in Isabelle’s mind.

When the ritual ends, Alice pays Isabelle and urges her to leave quickly. But Isabelle, shaken by a growing dread she cannot shake, refuses to go. She demands to know more of the dead man.

As sympathy strikes Alice's heart, she reassures Isabelle that the man was no murderer, before foolishly overstepping her reassurance with the revelation that he was the county hangman.

The truth crashes over Isabelle as she reveals that her late husband was in-fact executed for a crime. Thus deducing that the man lying dead in the next room is the very executioner who placed the noose around her own husbands neck. Hatred floods Isabelle’s heart.

The ritual has failed.

As the weight of the hangman’s sins awaken within her, something darker stirs. The Devil himself momentarily possesses Alice, taunting the doomed Sin Eater with the promise that they will meet again: at the end of her long and torrid days.