by Jill Vranken, Staff Writer 

CW: mentions of suicide 

Director Aislinn Clarke’s (The Devil’s Doorway) sophomore feature opens at a wedding in Ireland, 1973. The bride (Grace Collender), mysteriously disappears from her own festivities, after a group of ominous strangers wearing sackcloth masks make an uninvited appearance. Her confused groom (Mícheál Óg Lane) storms out to look for her, but can find no trace of her, apart from her Claddagh wedding ring lying discarded on the pavement. 

In the present, we are witness to a truly unnerving scene of a woman (Tara Breathnach) first preparing for, then enacting, her own suicide. Some time after, the woman’s daughter, a home care worker named Siúbhán (Clare Monnelly) reluctantly visits her mother’s house with her pregnant fiancée Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya), in order to sort out her belongings and take care of any general, death-related administration. 

Siúbhán, who prefers to be called Shoo, is a woman haunted by her traumatic childhood at the hands of her mother. Given that house is a wall to wall display of garish, frightening Catholic imagery–including a truly dreadful glow in the dark Virgin Mary statue and a buzzing neon red crucifix as the centerpiece of a claustrophobic prayer closet–it isn’t hard to connect the dots. To emphasize this point, Clarke has included some striking shots of said crucifix reflected in Shoo’s eyes, as if it’s burned into her retinas, like she can still see it so clearly when closes her eyes at night. The house feels like a chokehold, thick with a history of abuse, and Shoo is visibly uncomfortable and ready to leave from the moment she and Mila step in. 

When Shoo is offered an assignment in a remote part of the country, caring for an elderly woman with symptoms of dementia, she jumps at the chance to escape this confrontation with her upbringing, reasoning with a puzzled Mila that a baby on the way means they need the money more than ever. Upon Shoo’s arrival, she receives a less-than-warm welcome from her charge, the hostile Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), but the no-nonsense Shoo manages to convince her to at least let her in for the night. 

I had the chance to see a screening of Fréwaka at the London Film Festival in October, with Aislinn Clarke in attendance. Clarke explained in her introduction that the word fréwaka stems from the Irish word fréamhacha. The literal translation in English is “roots,” but as Clarke noted, it’s an imperfect translation as the Irish word has more texture, a sense of heavy roots hard to pull out of the ground. That sense is reflected in the film, as both Shoo and Peig are tangled heavily into the roots of their respective pasts. 

Shoo, while desperately wanting to escape the looming shadow of her mother’s death and the history that comes with it, finds she cannot, no matter how much physical distance she puts between herself and the situation back home. Throughout the movie, she fields a number of calls from Mila, growing frustrated with her fiancée’s inability to understand her reluctance to tidy up the house which was the site of intense trauma for her. Mila is frustrated right back at her, having been left alone and very pregnant, and Shoo struggles to keep the life that she’s built with Mila on solid ground while dealing with an increasing number of strange incidents at Peig’s house, and some bizarre confrontations with the villagers. 

Peig, meanwhile, has her own demons to deal with–literally. In her house, filled with taxidermy which can only be described as “of questionable quality,” there sits a blood red door which can never be opened, ringed with a number of rusting totems and horseshoes. Peig believes that this door keeps at bay the Na Sídhe, entities that she believes abducted her decades prior. Shoo and Peig form an unsteady bond, and slowly discover that they have more than just a history of trauma and Catholic Church violence to bind them together. 

Clarke uses well-loved folk horror tropes like the old dark house and Wicker Man-esque masked strangers, entwining them with Ireland’s dark women’s’ history, specifically the Magdalene laundries which haunt the fringes of this story. In a broader sense, it’s also a story about a country which is in itself thickly rooted in its own history. This makes Fréwaka a spine-chilling movie with two stunning central performances at its core. Monnelly and Ní Neachtain are both formidable as Shoo and Peig respectively, and watching them trade barbs in Irish (most of the dialogue is in Irish, with only the dialogue between Mila and Shoo, and Shoo and her employers in English) is spellbinding. 

Irish language cinema has had a huge year, with fellow horror film An Taibhse gaining traction on the festival circuit and Rich Peppiatt’s biopic/comedy/drama Kneecap being the Irish submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at next year’s Oscars. I would urge you to count Fréwaka among those successes, too. If you like dread, rot both internal and external and unique takes on folk horror, seek it out when it arrives on Shudder next year and be spellbound like me.