‘FRÉWAKA’ is a short-form of ‘fréamhacha’, meaning ‘roots’, and in the second feature from Dundalk-born film-maker Aislinn Clarke (The Devil’s Doorway), protagonist Shiubhán (Clare Monnelly) is doing her level best to keep hers safely buried.
Specifically, Shiubhán - ‘Shoo’ to her friends - has attempted to cut all ties with her mother, whose abusive parenting skills have left physical and mental scars. However, her mother’s death by suicide (the act and aftermath of which Clarke incorporates into the opening of her film in memorably grim detail) forces a reckoning of sorts when Irish speaker Shoo and her Ukranian partner, Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) - a neat device which adds an international dimension to the film - are tasked with clearing out her cluttered Dublin flat.
Careworker Shoo jumps at the chance to escape this excavation when she’s offered a new assignment: providing live-in support to a vulnerable woman living alone in a remote rural village.
Abandoning her pregnant fiancée to sift through mounds of shut-in detritus and Catholic idols, Shoo buses off to her new job, where she immediately receives a frosty reception from the sinister locals before eventually locating the dilapidated old pile inhabited by her elderly patient, Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) - and that’s where things start to get really weird.
As an audience, we’ve already met Peig in the film’s 1973-set prologue, where we see the young woman’s post-wedding party gatecrashed by thuggish Mummer types.
Soon, Peig is alone outside and facing off with a black goat - a scenario which never ends well in horror films - before apparently vanishing into the night.
Back in the present, Peig is not for letting Shoo into the house she’s adorned with all sorts of pagan trinkets and religious icons, echoing the kind of creepy environment Shoo’s late mother had built-up around herself.
Soon, Peig is alone outside and facing off with a black goat - a scenario which never ends well in horror films
While the care worker reconciles Peig’s obsessive adherence to superstitious rituals and ominous warnings about “thin places” and “them down there” as products of mental instability, soon Shoo’s own inner mental health struggles are confusing her (and us) about whether the increasingly creepy goings on in the house are genuine Satanic/supernatural phenomena or just all in her head.
Gleefully embracing haunted house tropes while pulling from The Wicker Man’s basket of folk horror tricks, the film taps into Ireland’s rich seams of weird religious folklore and painful generational trauma - chiefly the Church’s scandalous abuse of women, a theme shared with Clarke’s promising debut, The Devil’s Doorway.
Fréwaka may be low on startling ‘cross yourself’ moments, but it’s still a stylish exercise in slow-creeping claustrophobic dread elevated by a top-notch cast.
Rating: 3/5
