Father Brown: "The Horns of Cernunnos" (BBC Studios, BritBox, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Father Brown episode, “The Horns of Cernunnos,” was considerably better than the Sister Boniface Mysteries I watched before it on Saturday, January 31. Cernunnos, in case you were wondering, was an ancient pagan deity worshiped by some of the indigenous people of Britain before the Roman conquest. Marianne Gelbert (Zoe Brough), a young woman living in the ancestral castle of her father, Sir Benedict Gelbert (Christian Anholt), is convinced that the god Cernunnos is stalking her and haunting both her waking hours and her dreams. The moment I heard that I assumed that someone was disguising himself or herself as Cernunnos to terrorize poor Marianne for some sinister reason. Marianne wakes up one morning to find her father dead in the bed next to hers, and along the way we learn that Sir Benedict was actually in a Gay relationship with an African-British doctor, Marcellus Lansden (Clarence Smith). He’d just written a dear-john letter to Dr. Lansden breaking off the relationship when he was killed, and naturally the official police assume that Lansden was the murderer because he has the obvious motive. But Father Brown soon deduces that the real killer was [spoiler alert!] Sir Benedict’s wife Lilith (Phoebe Price), who agreed to marry Sir Benedict even though he was Gay because it would give her possession of Sir Benedict’s castle, which happens to be located on the ancestral land where Cernunnos had been worshiped way back when. She was the one who dressed herself in Cernunnos drag in order to intimidate Marianne. There’s an exciting climax (as exciting as a BBC production budget could make it, at least) in which Lilith entraps Father Brown and threatens to push him off a convenient cliff because according to the rules of the Cernunnos cult, the ground can be re-sanctified with the killing of a minister in a rival religion. Father Brown actually rescued Lilith from falling into her own trap and rather sanctimoniously tells her that his religion doesn’t believe in human sacrifice.