There’s a definite influence of The Wicker Man in Fréwaka, Aislinn Clarke’s second feature. You might call it The Fréwaka Man if you were being facetious. But it deserves better than that. And in any case the main character is a woman, so that’s enough of that foolishness.
It’s also the first horror movie in the Irish language, so doubly deserving of more than just a casual glance. Before the opening credits have rolled, Clarke has set out her stall – pagan, unnatural, spooky things are going to happen in this movie, it seems clear, from the vignette we’re given of a wedding where a clearly pregnant young woman is the bride, it’s rural Ireland in the 1970s and a goat looks on at proceedings decked out in faintly satanic regalia.
Clarke then cuts to the present day, the city and to Shoo (Clare Monnelly), a troubled young woman whose mother has just hanged herself. Shoo and her pregnant girlfriend Mila are clearing out her dead mother’s dingy flat. But instead of staying around to see it through, Shoo hightails it off to take a job as a carer in a remote part of Ireland where Irish is the first language. And ends up in a big, creepy house while Irish-speaking Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), who rattles around the building, makes gnomic announcements about “them” who live in the “house under the house”. Here, Shoo will come to face her fears and her past, which turns out to be her destiny. Dot dot dot.
The atmospherics are immense and intense, Clarke building up a mood that would be cosy if the lighting (by talented DP Narayan Van Maele) weren’t so murky, in a house full of stuffed animals, old paintings and the sort of stuff that might have been bought in a job lot from a horror paraphernalia shop. Clarke cannot fall back on jockish banter, the useful counterpoint to the silent, lurking something in so many horror films of the spooky house variety. Not with the semi-demented old dear and her watchful nurse. Instead Clarke fills in the silences with quiet sonic moodscapes – wind sighs, rain drips, things tick, while the soundtrack by Die Hexen rises to a crescendo only when it has to, and instead tinkles away gently, almost below the threshold of hearing.
Add to all that minimalism the slow dolly shots and the generally sedate camera and on the wrong day, in the wrong mood, it would bore you stiff. Yet Clarke does it all so well that it grabs hold if you let it. This is both a portrait of a young woman trying to come to terms with her history and, without overdoing it, a picture of a modern Ireland trying to throw off the weight of its past.
So, no, no craic, no fiddles, no game old boys in their one suit blathering on in the local pub over a pint of stout. Instead, an array of characters who are not from central casting, though god knows Peig would fit the bill if Ní Neachtain weren’t so adept at working through the gears, making Peig by turns careworn, eccentric, frightened, a bit naughty. It is well cast all round, and I don’t just mean Monnelly, who does a very good job with her character, a blank page when we meet her and remaining a bit of a blank until everything starts to fall into place near the end. Every small role is well filled. That white-haired guy on the bus who thinks by talking in Irish Shoo won’t be able to understand him, the glowering redheaded kid first glimpsed with a goat on tether, the women in the local grocer’s who exchange knowing glances behind Shoo’s back. Even the receptionist at the doctor’s, who’s just a tiny bit too efficiently intrusive.
I won’t tell you how it pays off, all this moodiness and tension, but it does pay off, and in a way that bolsters the comparison with The Wicker Man. Or Midsommar if you like. It does not end well.
Fréwaka – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
