Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Aislinn Clarke
Starring: Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
The recent folk-horror revival has resulted in too many movies that
think it's enough to simply appropriate the iconography of the sub-genre
(ie, ripping off The Wicker Man) rather than ploughing their own narrative furrow. With its prologue
set in 1973 (the year of The Wicker Man's release) and featuring a creepy goat and sinister masked figures, it
seems we're in for more of the same with writer/director Aislinn Clarke's Fréwaka. But Clarke's film stands out in this over-harvested field, thanks to
its unique language and setting. Most of the dialogue is in Irish, and
the film uses its Gaeltacht setting effectively, a classic folk-horror
enclave that seems to exist out of time.
After that prologue, which sees a young bride disappear on her wedding
night, we cut to the present day where Dubliner Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is clearing out the flat left behind by her estranged mother's
suicide with the aid of her pregnant Ukrainian fiancée Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya). A freelance care worker, Shoo is relieved to be called away from
such a grim task when she receives a two-week placement in the
Gaeltacht.
Following some classic warnings from locals to turn away while she can,
Shoo arrives at her assigned place of work, the home of the elderly Peig
(Bríd Ní Neachtain). Peig appears to be suffering from extreme
dementia, constantly rambling about a mysterious "them" she believes
live beneath her house. Initially refusing to allow Shoo to enter her
home, and going out of her way to antagonise her, Peig begins to bond
with Shoo, a bond that grows stronger when Shoo begins to suffer intense
hallucinations and starts to wonder if maybe Peig isn't quite as
delusional as she appears.
Fréwaka represents a great creative step-up from Clarke's debut, the
ramshackle found footage thriller The Devil's Doorway. Like that movie, Clarke's latest is keen to highlight the PTSD left
on generations of Irish women by decades of mistreatment by the Catholic
church, but it does so in more subtle fashion. Irish viewers over a
certain age will be affected by Clarke's deployment of the sort of tacky
Catholic souvenirs that induced nightmares for kids visiting the homes
of devout aunts and grannies, with a glow in the dark Virgin Mary in
particular bringing back unwanted memories for this writer.
Where The Devil's Doorway felt constrained by its first person perspective, the
conventional filmmaking here allows Clarke to build suspenseful
sequences with greater ease. Clarke and cinematographer Narayan Van Maele make horror hay with a widescreen format that keeps us uneasily
looking out for figures appearing at the edge of the screen. Peig's home
is a marvel of Nicola Moroney's production design. A
suffocating mess of Catholic trinkets, stuffed animals and rotting food,
it's up there with the family home from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
But the heart of Clarke's film comes from two endearing central
performances. Monnelly and Ní Neachtain are quietly devastating as
two women dealing with trauma in very different ways, Peig tackling it
head on while Shoo hopes her troubles will go away if she buries her
head in the sand. Their relationship reminded me of Anthony Perkins and
Meg Tilly in Psycho II, as did the melancholy score by Die Hexen (not to
mention the stuffed animals). As with that under-appreciated
sequel, Fréwaka is about attempting to escape the madness of the past, only to
find it alive in the present. Today's generation of Irish women may not
be suffering the social restrictions of their grandmothers, but the
wounds of a past largely left unspoken have yet to heal.
Fréwaka is on Shudder UK and
in Irish cinemas from April 25th.
