The Plot: Shoo (Clare Monnelly) takes up a position looking after the aging Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) who is suffering from a number of ailments including dementia. Peig is a little more disconnected from reality than most people and is more tuned into an otherworldly frequency where she ominously talks about ‘them’. The atmosphere around the house starts to affect Shoo to the point where she questions her own sanity, as she sees things from her own troubled past…
The Verdict: Frewaka or Roots (check out that literally eye-catching poster) is a story not so much of a haunted house or a haunted place but of haunted people whose pasts won’t let them go anytime soon. The foundation of the film is generational trauma and how that can affect perceptions of reality. It’s an ambitious second feature for director Aislinn Clarke, following her 2018 debut The Devil’s Doorway. She grew up with classic horror films like A Nightmare On Elm Street but wanted to play against expectations of the genre. With Frewaka, that works both in her favour and against it.
As both writer and director, Frewaka is something of a deconstructed horror film built more around the dramatic staging of a character’s mental breakdown. This is further re-inforced by the idea that the characters don’t know that they’re in a horror film (unlike the post-modern trend of, say, Scream). Clarke has said that horror is about communicating an emotion and she is right about that. There’s a strong enough story ticking away about two women at different stages in their lives – one about to welcome new life into the world and the other edging closer to death. There’s friction there at first, but soon they come to realise that they’re more connected than they initially appear. Things go bump in the night and a doorway becomes a portal into… something, somewhere else. Mixed in with that is a folk horror aspect, drawing in pagan rituals, oral history and the more unsettling aspects of ancient Irish culture.
The weighty baggage of ancestors is what Clarke is trying to get across here. Watching this play out in the Irish language only adds to that narrative authenticity, like something dug up out of the past and which won’t go back into the mouldy earth. As Peig puts it cryptically early on, trying to get rid of something means it can’t be gotten rid of. It’s a film that is surprisingly light on actual scares, which might disappoint those looking for something more overt. What it lacks in scares though, it makes up for in atmosphere. With some striking imagery and a foreboding score by Die Hexen (You Are Not My Mother, Double Blind), this is one consistently moody film that gets the pulse racing rather than go for the spurting jugular. An unusual entry from the more conventional offerings found in TG4’s Cine4 scheme (Brid Ni Neachtain was also in Roise & Frank), Frewaka gets its freaky on to entertaining and atmospheric effect. Clarke continues to show promise as a writer/director of note.
Rating: 3 / 5
Review by Gareth O’Connor
In short: Freaky
Directed by Aislinn Clarke. Starring Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain, Clare Barrett, Charlotte Bradley.