Mystical Irish Folk Horror Fréwaka Weaves an Unnerving Spell

Generational trauma is of course fertile ground for modern horror cinema and self-styled “elevated” horror genre offerings, even if the grief-stained trappings of that outline–codified by the likes of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster–have increasingly become the stuff of horror satire in the last few years. These themes are elemental, however, and aren’t truly capable of being fully played out … particularly when they’re given a hook so singular and richly detailed as the setting and characters of director Aislinn Clarke’s Fréwaka. By honing in on a deeply real-feeling, underutilized corner of the world (and its natural language, now infrequently heard), Fréwaka manages to upcycle its story about the trauma of mental health and abuse between mothers and daughters, infusing real-world horrors with hauntingly supernatural, fae overtones. A highly subjective horror experience, Fréwaka rarely gives concrete answers as to the reality of what we’re seeing, but that never makes its potent imagery and outstanding performances any less effective.

Siubhán (Clare Monnelly), helpfully nicknamed Shoo, is an Irish medical caretaker who has inherited a deeply unwelcome task: Cleaning out her estranged mother’s apartment (completely and creepily inundated with religious paraphernalia) after the woman completed suicide. Together with her pregnant Ukrainian fiancee Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya), Shoo is expected to pore over a lifetime of detritus assembled by someone who was clearly mentally unwell, while reckoning with the childhood abuse that this same person subjected her to. It’s little wonder that Shoo grasps at the opportunity to slip away from the responsibility by accepting a temporary nursing job that relocates her to the country, assigned to watch over the infirm Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), a woman recovering at home after a stroke. One problem: The deeply suspicious, paranoid Peig wants nothing to do with her, and seems consumed by various superstitions that she believes are the only thing that will shield her from the vengeful, mythological forces that dwell on the periphery of her home, ever looking for an opportunity to worm their way in to complete the abduction they performed on her decades earlier.

The heart of Fréwaka is the often acerbic caretaker/matriarchal relationship between these two women, with occasional interludes from Mila as she attempts to engage Shoo in processing her feelings surrounding the death of her mother. But the film belongs to Monnelly and Neachtain, who each turn in brilliant performances as a wounded, modern woman and a haunted, rural traditionalist, now forced to coexist as they encounter whispers of supernatural portent and a trauma that may be more shared than they can conceive. The film rings with these various clashes between ideologies: Christianity vs. older, broader pagan beliefs, modernity vs. folk tradition, English vs. the Irish language that preceded it. The latter is of particular importance: Fréwaka, along with this year’s An Taibhse, has been marketed as the first true Irish language horror feature, and it beautifully illustrates the divide between the world of the urbane city (where Shoo’s mother embraced Christianity) and the country that still clings to older ways and unshakeable beliefs in things that go bump in the night–and perhaps it’s this belief that lends those things power. Shoo is effectively a living gateway between the two worlds: She’s equally proficient in English and Irish, to the constant surprise of the country people who don’t expect much understanding from her. But her attunement to their world also means a greater degree of danger for herself, from the forces that plague both Shoo and Peig. The unseen world seems drawn to her, hungry for her.

Or perhaps nothing plagues them at all, besides a potent, shared delusion and heightened suggestion brought on by mental illness. It’s hard to say concretely what if anything in Fréwaka is real, per se, thanks to a lack of reliable narrators and vantage points we can trust. The uncertainty, no doubt, is the point. Instead of knowing where we stand, we’re invited to invest our belief in the many superstitions depicted, such as the application of “wards”–substances like salt, iron or urine, which we’re told “they don’t like,” Peig always refusing to name “they” directly. Does some of it help? Does none of it help? Does the faith invested into religious mania or numerology lend those things a kind of spiritual power? The lack of concrete “rules” helps to amplify the mystical portent of pretty much everything we see, in a way that evokes another great Welsh-Irish-British supernatural horror film, Liam Gavin’s A Dark Song. As in that film, we’re always uneasy about potential ways that our characters may have transgressed or slipped up.