Fréwaka (2024)
Dir. Aislinn Clarke
Reviewed by Matt (@Cleric20) Adcock
Starring: Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain
Genre: Irish-language Folk Horror
"Folklore and trauma collide…”
Something wicked stirs in the shadows of Ireland’s mist-shrouded folklore. Fréwaka, the bold and deeply unsettling second feature from Aislinn Clarke (The Devil’s Doorway), is an Irish-language horror that grips like a cold hand from beyond the veil.
This is not horror by numbers either, oh no, it’s horror that seeps into your bones, steeped in grief, guilt, and ancestral trauma.
Shoo (a superb Clare Monnelly) begins to question everything as we follow her, a palliative care nurse reeling from the suicide of her estranged mother.
Emotionally adrift, she takes a job in a remote Irish village, tending to an elderly woman named Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), whose mind is fractured by memories of being stolen away by the Na Sídhe, dark mythic entities said to spirit people from this world. But as Shoo digs deeper into Peig’s haunted recollections, the edges of reality begin to fray, and what begins as care work curdles into a harrowing confrontation with personal and collective ghosts.
“This house holds more than memories…”
Clarke eschews cheap scares for a potent, slow-building dread. Every creak of wood, every breath in the silence, feels like an omen. The rural setting becomes a liminal space between the living and the dead, where trauma festers and refuses to be buried. Visions emerge: masked figures, animal totems, a red door that beckons like a wound. Every element is symbolic, and all of it drips with menace. Personal favs the glowing red cross and 'glow-in-the-dark' Virgin Mary statue.
Monnelly gives a powerhouse performance, grounding the film in emotional authenticity. As Shoo’s stoicism begins to crack, the story opens into a deeper reflection on mother-daughter bonds, inherited pain, and the horrors society chooses to forget. Ní Neachtain is extraordinary too, her Peig is both pitiable and unnerving, a vessel for ancient memory and madness alike.
“Ireland’s ghosts do not rest easily.”
What truly elevates Fréwaka is its ambition. This is horror as reckoning. When Peig speaks of the realm she was taken to, she describes not a fairytale underworld, but a dystopia of starvation, silence, and shame. The line between folklore and real-world suffering collapses in terrifying fashion.
The atmosphere is suffocating, the sound design eerie and unrelenting and the supernatural is just a heartbeat away.
Fréwaka is a rare beast, artful, chilling, and emotionally devastating. It joins the ranks of horror cinema that doesn’t just want to scare you, but to say something true and painful. Fans of Saint Maud, or The VVitch will find much to admire here.
Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:
öööö
(4 - This is horror that hurts. And lingers...)
Matt's Top Folk Horror Movies:
The Wicker Man (1973)
The definitive folk horror classic—an eerie collision of Christian morality and pagan ritual, culminating in one of the most iconic endings in cinema history.
Midsommar (2019)
A sun-drenched nightmare that turns grief and toxic relationships into a florally wrapped descent into cultish horror, both hypnotic and viscerally disturbing.
The VVitch (2015)
A slow-burning 17th-century tale of religious paranoia and supernatural doom, with a chilling atmosphere and one unforgettable goat named Black Phillip.
Kill List (2011)
Starts as a hitman thriller, then veers into occult terror, brutally bleak, disorienting, and shocking in its final moments.
A Field in England (2013)
Ben Wheatley's surreal black-and-white odyssey of alchemy and madness in the English Civil War, folk horror as a psychedelic fever dream.
The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)
A grim tale of a demonic force infecting a rural village’s youth—beautifully shot, deeply unsettling, and a core pillar of the folk horror “unholy trinity.”
Häxan (1922)
A silent docu-horror hybrid about witchcraft through the ages, avant-garde, creepy, and way ahead of its time in both imagery and message.
Wake Wood (2009)
Modern Irish folk horror about grief and resurrection, channelling Pet Sematary through the eerie lens of rural ritual and pastoral vengeance.
The Ritual (2017)
A lads’ hiking trip in Sweden becomes a chilling confrontation with Norse mythology, creepy forest atmosphere and one of the best monster designs in years.
Bleak and atmospheric, this Welsh tale of creeping dread weaves economic hardship with pagan fear in a brutally intimate family tragedy.
Eyes of Fire (1983)
A U.S. frontier-set tale that blends folk magic, early colonial fear, and indigenous spirits, beautifully strange and unsettling.
Lord of Misrule (2023)
Set in a rural English village where tradition masks something ancient and malevolent, this eerie slow-burn dives deep into the rot beneath seasonal celebration and blind faith.
The Droving (2020)
A brooding, micro-budget folk thriller following a haunted man on a journey through moors and masked rituals, moody, mysterious, and steeped in folkloric revenge.
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