Frewaka

 I saw Aislinn Clarke's Frewaka open the 2024 Belfast Film Festival last night. And it's a fantastic achievement. The film, not my watching it. 

Folk Horror is a strange beast. A film genre invented twenty years after the accidental collision of themes in a couple of horror films, those films being The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan's Claw. The third film in the usual historical triumvirate, Witchfinder General, is not Folk Horror and is, in intent, the opposite of Folk Horror. These films are nominally responsible for a sprawling morass of movies that are cheap to make as they're set in the woods at night. All that camera (or phone) joggling. The random screams in the darkness. The torchlit corn-dollies. I'm looking at you, Invoked. The proper antecedent of most of the things that purport to be Folk Horror is The Blair Witch Project. Which is, of course, Folk Horror. 

Happily, Frewaka, is far more interesting. It's a film about stuff. Things. Clutter. The objects that surround us. Irish Catholicism is full of tat: glow-in-the-dark-Virgin-Marys full of holy water, winking Jesus rulers, holy medals and prayer cards. My mum erected a Marian shrine most Maydays. My Grandparents - and I suspect everyone's Irish grandparents - had The Big Three on the wall: Jesus, Pope John Paul II ("the good pope") and JFK. They were household gods, smiling down, pale and benevolent, JFK proof it was possible to be Irish and have good teeth. Frewaka remains the first horror film where key scenes of menace are garlanded with pictures of Padre Pio and The Child of Prague. Only Peter Walker's The House of Mortal Sin uses a cross so effectively as the sign that bad shit is about to go down. This reliquary is a constant in Catholic countries, and I think stems from a time when objects were scarce and the things you owned, that were actually yours, carried significance and weight. Objects had power and meaning. They protected you. All fairies hate iron, so things made or iron, nails or horseshoes, kept them away. The more stuff you had the more protected you were. 

Clutter as armour. 

(In the film, a full leg of metal armour is glimpsed, wearing what appears to be a brogue. Given the protagonist's name is "Shoo", this can only be a subtle visual joke. The devil is very much in the detail here.)

Shoo's (Clare Monnelly) mother, an alcoholic depressive, has recently committed suicide. Shoo, herself a depressive, is a primary carer, and takes on a job looking after invalided Peig (Brid Ni Neachtain) in her big, isolated house, to avoid dealing with her feelings, and leaving her heavily pregnant fiancé Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) to strip her mother's flat. None of the locals help Shoo - the Irish are presented throughout as secretive, insular and unfriendly, which already marks this film as unusual - and Peig greets her with thrown salt and piss. Shoo smashes a window and lets herself in, to find Peig difficult and dirty - the fae don't like dirt - and unwilling to take her medicine, as it fogs her wits in her perpetual battle against the fairy folk. "They hate us" she tells Shoo. Peig's house is awash with great tides of things, a landfill of gewgaws. It's a fortress against the fae. Meanwhile, on Shoo's instruction, Mila is stripping her mother's house of her protections. She is unknowingly being denuded of her armour. 

The most protected place in Peig's house is the sinister red door leading to the cellar. It's framed in iron, and three iron nails stand sentry in front of it. Three is a good number, Peig tells Shoo. The audience doesn't need to be told that - we know three is the magic number. Yes it is. Aislinn Clarke's debut feature was The Devil's Doorway, and this is another story about a puncture between two worlds, the veil thinned, a hasty drop into liminal space. Shoo descends like Persephone into Hades, like Lucy Pevensie to Narnia, encountering echtrai and baili as she traverses a Mag Mell that's more plain than honey. 

I'm not going to go into the plot any further than this. Both Shoo and Peig have their mental health issues, and there's always the possibility they develop into a folie a deux as the film progresses. When the fae do appear they are representatives of authority, of the state, of society. Shoo and Peig are powerless, persecuted women trapped in house with only their wits and what's to hand to protect them from an all powerful agency that wants to change their behaviours, police them, blunt them with medicines, and remove their autonomy. That's not only the story of every persecuted witch in history, its the story of millions of women in the world today. 

But also, the fae are real here, and they're angry and cruel and they never tire and they never give up, and they want things the women have. They reckon they're owed. They're gangsters. The mood of the film is oppressive. The house becomes a prison, the women under siege. The noose tightens around their necks. The bad things are coming. 

There are shuddering frights throughout, helped by the extraordinary Die Hexen soundtrack, which is astonishingly dynamic, ranging from lurching, sub-bass crunches, to lyrical passages of flute and tin drum. It's extraordinary work. The editing, too, is alchemical. Memories echo through the film, perfect overlays, recontextualising parts of the narrative. It feels like there's not a spare frame of film. Each scene breathes perfectly. 

Both leads are wonderful, their initial suspicion turning to respect and belief, as they're assailed by an invisible army. The film is basically a two hander - the house is the next biggest role - and they carry the whole project. And in Clare Monnelly, Clarke seems to have found an Irish Charlotte Gainsbourg. 

Clarke's writing and direction are unsentimental and detailed. She drops narrative clues, she makes suggestions, she subverts herself and the tropes she's working with. She is assured. And she brings class and gravity to Irish Folk Horror. Folk Horror might have been born in England (or a bit of made up Scotland, imagined by English people) but it belongs in the stygian sod of Ireland, where Fairy trees are respected, where the old rules survive, where subterranean earthworks still greet the low winter sun. Folk Horror's coming home.  

Horslips is a funny name for a band. But I've heard Horslips now. Horslips are in this film.