Jon Wright’s 2012 creature feature Grabbers strikes such a fine balance between humor, eccentric characters, tentacular FX, and political subtext that it might qualify as one of the 2010s’ triumphs of independent genre cinema. His follow-up Robot Wars merely echoed its predecessor’s spirit without recapturing it, leaving his audience to wonder whether it’s better to hope for a new direction (even if unsuccessful) or a skillful rehash (even if artistically stagnant). So it’s a welcome discovery that Wright’s latest film, Unwelcome, feels of a piece with Grabbers while taking its own distinct tack. Like Grabbers, Unwelcome lodges itself firmly in Ireland’s smalltown soil, though Wright returns to shore from the former’s remote island setting and opts instead for the country’s rural idyll; both films focus on protagonists burdened by personal struggles while putting up with otherworldly nuisances. In Grabbers, the “nuisance” is a race of flesh-hungry extraterrestrial octopods. In Unwelcome, it’s the far darrig.
This is par for the course. A sizable chunk of Ireland’s contemporary horror cinema is informed by traditional folklore, and a chunk of that chunk relates to fae critters who absolutely cannot resist the opportunity to kidnap a baby: See Corin Hardy’s The Hallow, Michael Tully’s Don’t Leave Home, and Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground. Unwelcome fits snugly in this company, being the story of parents-to-be Jamie (Douglas Booth) and Maya (Hannah John-Kamen), recently decamped from London after a home invasion leaves the couple traumatized and in desperate need for, as Jamie puts it, “peace.” His late great-aunt left him her farmhouse in her will, and he decides to move Maya there so they can raise their imminent newborn in safety’s bosom.
The thing about Ireland is, there are magical and supernatural and plain old bizarre entities lying in wait no matter where you go. Maeve, for instance, was known to put out a piece of raw liver by her garden gate every night, an offering for the far darrig–the little people known as Red Caps, snickering goblins all too happy to go straight from “mischievous” to “murderous” should circumstances permit. Things swiftly get weird around her new nest, and, after the couple hires a local family to renovate the house, they get dangerous, too. The Whelans–“Daddy” (Colm Meaney) and his three adult children, Aisling (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), Killian (Chris Walley), and Eoin (Kristian Nairn)–are such scoundrels that they make the Red Caps look preferable as neighbors.
Comparisons between Unwelcome and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs abound in the film’s early reviews–it opened in Ireland and the U.K. in January–and for the most part, they work. But at times the film’s truly unwelcoming character is Jamie, who reacts to that violent break-in by trying to mold himself into a prototypically manly shape. He’s squirrely and patronizing, and redeemed largely by the unfailingly kind Maya: She loves him, and that’s good enough for the audience. But it isn’t good enough for the Whelans, who find Jamie too aloof for their liking. He’s actually aloof because he’s afraid; if he brought himself to say so, he and Daddy would be spared an awful lot of trouble.