DARKNESS IN THE FIELDS: ALL YOU NEED IS DEATH
Love is a knife with a blade for a handle
All You Need is Death was screened at the Darkness in the Fields film festival on the 23rd of March at the Derby Quad Cinema.
Folk horror as a genre is essentially a collection of tall tales and legends, passed down the generations through word of mouth – with some of these becoming part of our collective consciousness as superstition and others falling to the wayside. In Paul Duane’s feature, All You Need is Death, it is the nature of the telling that matters as much as the content.
Simone Collins and Charlie Maher play a young couple, Anna and Aleks, who travel across Ireland listening to and documenting rare folk ballads. Tipped off about a singer with a knowledge of previously unheard songs, they meet Rita Concannon (Olwen Fouéré), who performs an ancient ballad that predates the Irish language and must only be heard in person, and by women.
These rules are important, and therefore promptly broken. Also in the room is Agnes (Catherine Simmons), who has followed the trail of clues left by Anna and Aleks. Agnes covertly records the song, kicking off a chain of events that escalate to bloody body horror by the final moments.
In Irish, to say ‘I love you’ literally translates to ‘my love is on you’. Love is described as less of a feeling and more of something that possesses a person. Here, the entity kept at bay by the ballad is both a malevolent presence in its own right and a possessor, and it’s here where the film loses its footing in places. Duane clearly has a lot of ideas but these lead to various plot threads that are never completed.
There’s a seemingly sinister company purchasing the recordings from Anna and Aleks which is never seen, nor mentioned, after the first act. There’s the physical manifestation of the entity, which commits one particularly gruesome murder but never seems to pose a threat afterwards, apparently only there to bring together two of the characters – although there are some very nice effects with the black smudges that haunt the protagonists at various points.
Once Duane has settled on the possession angle, the film gains steam. There’s a particularly excellent performance by Nigel O’Neill as Rita’s son. O’Neill, who played the lead in Bad Day for the Cut, once again brings a level of depth to a character that could easily be one-dimensional. While Breezeblock enters the film as a rather vicious thug, disliked by his mother and most of the people around him, Duane cleverly spends a lot of time delving into the character’s childhood trauma, and by the end of the film he comes through as the main protagonist.
Once we reach the finale, Duane pulls out all the stops with a series of excellent practical effects that drag the film firmly into body horror territory. There’s a queasy, uncomfortable feeling to everything that happens – bringing together generational trauma, unrequited love and female repression into a series of brief, jaw-dropping scenes that stay with you long after the credits have rolled.
Writer/director: Paul Duane
Starring: Simone Collins, Charlie Maher, Olwen Fouéré, Barry McKiernan, Nigel O'Neill, Catherine Siggins