Roads less taken
A pair of ambitious horror films aim for something beyond the genre’s familiar tropes and devices, but each comes somewhat unstuck in the process
All You Need is Death
Dir Paul Duane, Ireland 2023 In cinemas from 19 April
A very strange film indeed. Straddling the border that separates body horror from folk horror, with a bit of the Roy Castle ‘voodoo jazz’ segment from Dr Terror’s House of Horrors thrown in; you could create a truly bizarre Venn diagram to summarise this film.
The central characters are Anna and Aleks, who, like most young couples, are absolutely mad keen on obscure Irish songs. I don’t mean U2 B-sides; we’re talking about Irish folk songs. Getting wind of one such number – a properly ancient one, rooted deep in mythology – they track it down to a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, the home of Rita Concannon, the only woman who can sing it. Despite being a mad old crone who hides from strangers in a cupboard, she agrees to perform the song; what she doesn’t know is that it is surreptitiously being recorded, which, according to the lore, is strictly verboten. This point is rammed home, so to speak, when shortly after her visitors have left Rita is brutally murdered with a bottle of whisky.
After this, the plot gets harder to follow. Rita’s son turns up and determines to find her killer, setting out on a path that eventually leads him to Anna and then to Aleks, but nothing is what it seems. The last 15 minutes are extraordinary, calling to mind Xtro, Zulawksi’s Possession, Inseminoid and sundry other baffling or gruesome horrors.
I preferred the first half to the second. The theme of collecting old folk songs is a good one. The style is naturalistic, the settings are recognisable, and there are people on screen other than the main characters. The second half is totally different – phantasmagorical, irritatingly obscure and eventually drowning in buckets of blood – and has a less than satisfying conclusion. The theme running through it all is obsessive love, and the point at which one is prepared to do the unthinkable to preserve it.
Not wholly successful, then, but neither is it a gong show. It isn’t scary, but it does have a fine sense of impending, inescapable doom. It has enough individuality to stand out from run-of-themill folk horror and sufficient brutality to make an impression in the field more broadly; but it may be just too abstruse to make an impression outside the genre. Daniel King
★★★★★
Lovely, Dark and Deep
Dir Teresa Sutherland, US 2023 Available on digital platforms
A newly-qualified National Park Ranger, Lennon (Georgina Campbell, star of 2022’s Barbarian), is assigned to a remote area as her first detail. Here she patrols, picks up litter and aids hikers in trouble. However, she has an ulterior motive: she is also desperately searching for her daughter, who went missing in that region some time before. In fact, her daughter is not the only person to have disappeared there without trace. As Lennon goes about her tasks she listens to a podcast, one of those that digs up old unsolved crimes, all about the mysterious goings on.
All very promising: an intriguing storyline, achingly beautiful locations and the prospect of gruesome events to come. Unfortunately, Lovely, Dark and Deep doesn’t deliver the goods. Even the title (taken from a poem by Robert Frost) is merely allusive, having little to do with the characters or the story. Frankly, it’s a little pretentious, as if someone had Googled ‘poems about forests’ and picked a random quote.
Secondly, there’s a massive plot hole: surely, if so many people have disappeared in such a specific area and in such mysterious circumstances then a higher authority than the Park Rangers would have investigated, particularly since at least one Park Ranger is among the missing.Yet no one seems to wonder why the police or the FBI aren’t crawling over the place.
Thirdly, for the first half (of an 87-minute movie) nothing scary happens, much less anything terrifying. There’s simply not enough incident to hold one’s interest. Perhaps aware of this, the director throws the kitchen sink at the second half; it’s absolutely barking, as Lennon begins to lose her grip on sanity when the isolation of her situation gets hold of her. The action shifts away from the National Park (a shame, because the stunning scenery is the best thing on offer here) to a series of dark interiors where all manner of weird things happen, using tropes familiar to anyone who has seen a horror movie, ever. The big reveal, when it comes, takes place, inexplicably, in a dark room with two characters chest deep in water.
Watching this film is a frustrating experience. Clearly the director is aiming for something a little more ambitious than the usual backwoods thriller; rather than being an out-and-out horror, this is a psychological horror; which in practice means you can get away with doing less. There are echoes of films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Don’t Look Now, but this film lacks the atmosphere and artistry of those. In delivering so little, and in such a ham-fisted way, Lovely, Dark and Deep doesn’t even make as big an impact as more routine backwoods horrors such as Scalps or Just Before Dawn, which at least hit their targets. The locations (the film was shot in Portugal) are truly breathtaking, but sadly that just isn’t enough.
Daniel King
★★★★★
The second half is phantasmagoric and irritatingly obscure