For a nation so renowned for its traditional music, dance and storytelling, Ireland is oddly lacking in commercially successful folk horror films. Aislinn Clarke’s Fréwaka arrives at a good time to right that wrong, its haunted house and cultish figures in an isolated rural town blending with the ever more common family trauma plotline to ride a number of contemporary waves.
In doing so, it makes for somewhat familiar viewing, but is nonetheless a sufficiently eerie and mysterious affair to satisfy those with a taste for the sinister.
★★★☆☆
In the midst of clearing out her late mother’s home, Dublin care worker Siubhán (Clare Monnelly), Shoo to her friends and fiancée, is summoned to a large house in a remote village where she will look after the elderly Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain). Chosen for her ability to speak Irish, in which most of the film’s dialogue is spoken, Shoo must navigate the paranoia, agoraphobia and delusions mentioned in Peig’s report.
The building and its garden are adorned with trinkets and symbols designed to ward off the evil spirits that Peig believes abducted her on her wedding night decades ago, and its sole resident engages in a number of her own rituals, most startlingly urinating at the front door. Though Shoo is initially dismissive of her patient’s quirks, the toll of her abusive mother’s death and everything it brings up is a heavy one and the fantasies begin to take on credence as her own mental state declines.
Who exactly the antagonists at the door are, is left open to interpretation, but it’s clear they speak to the contradiction of Ireland’s mythologies and traditions. The most overt reference to the past is the paganish masked ‘straw boys’ who visit Peig’s wedding in the film’s prologue, while a recurring black goat and various Catholic paraphernalia suggest something more conventionally Old Testament. On the other hand, the film’s exploration of mental health, female experience and the devastating legacy of the Magdalene laundries invites a reading that places the true malevolence of the story within its damaged protagonists.
Rooted in eerie rural tradition, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons with the likes of Ari Aster’s Midsommer and its folk horror progenitor, The Wicker Man, but beyond the obvious, Fréwaka shares with these films a slower pace than most modern horror fare, a desire to creep towards the climax with an impressive sense of dread and foreboding. While there is plenty of conventional stuff in there – the familial trauma throughline feels increasingly old hat in the age of A24 – the pared-down tone strikes a more esoteric chord than its premise suggests, eschewing the jump scare and embracing the horror of the unknown.
Monnelly and Ní Neachtain really hold the story together, performing what is for the most part, a two-hander set in the paradoxically grand and claustrophobic setting of Peig’s home; it’s not hard to imagine Fréwaka working well on stage, dependent as it is on this central tête-à-tête. It begins as a typical carer-patient relationship, Shoo having to use her wit and negotiation skills to encourage the stubborn Peig to play ball, take her medication and place her trust in her new carer. But eventually, Shoo’s own fragility comes to the fore and her façade of authority crumbles; Monnelly handles this deterioration deftly, playing it with the kind of raw sincerity normally reserved for hard-hitting social realist drama, not a genre film of this ilk.
Perhaps most impressive is how Clarke, who also wrote the screenplay, keeps us guessing right up to the very end. Peig’s frailties are evident from the start and it doesn’t take long for Shoo’s unreliability as a conduit for the audience to become clear, so we are left to navigate a sea of dubious perspectives for most of the film’s runtime. The devastating audio work from composer Die Hexen and sound designer Dom Lawrence, and the sheer density of symbolic imagery drawn from various cultural sources that fills so many of the film’s frames, contribute to a sense of disorientation that obscures and distracts from the central mystery. When the terror ramps up it’s easy to get lost in it all.
The title Fréwaka is a shortening of the Irish ‘fréamhacha’, meaning roots, and few words capture so well what this film is all about. Its exploration of intergenerational relationships and Irish history make this obvious enough, but as an exercise in genre Clarke’s film is a love letter to her own roots as a horror filmmaker. There’s no wheel reinvention going on here, but it’s creepy, cryptic, and packs a sensory punch.
The Verdict
Although it’s a mishmash of common tropes, Fréwaka’s exploration of Irish history through blending mythologies and traditions manages to offer something new to a well-worn format. A strong script and powerful central performances bode well for Irish-language cinema, which is enjoying a fine run of form.
Words by Louis Roberts
Film Premieres Exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ Friday 25 April
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