This singular Irish horror feels unearthed from the wettest bit of the oldest bog , but it also gets at a very contemporary understanding of the native culture. It matters that Ian Lynch, founder member of, has written the more than usually significant score. All You Need Is Death joins that band in winding the macabre into retoolings of ancient shapes and shadows. This stuff was always there in folk art. But it is increasingly being dragged downstage.
At its heart is a horror staple: possessed cultural content. It was a book in The Evil Dead. It was a videotape in Ringu. Here it is a prehistoric song. Anna and Aleks play researchers wandering Ireland in search of forgotten folk tunes. For a minute or two we could reasonably see them as successors to the great US folklorist Alan Lomax – capturing music of the earth before it’s lost – but a mysterious meeting in a car park suggests they are caught up in some more sinister conspiracy.
Michael Palin on the loss of his wife of 57 years: ‘you feel you’ll never have a friend as close as that’ There is a sense here of a journey into the chaotic whorl. The opening half-hour or so is reasonably lucid. We have some idea what the two leads are after. Catherine Siggins is on good, equivocal form as a collaborator with a puzzling agenda, but the movement is, nonetheless, reasonably linear. In the second half, echoing much Japanese and Korean horror, order is less easy to establish.