[Source: ABC]

Fréwaka, a word taken from the longer Irish word ‘fréamhacha’, translates to ‘roots’, which Irish writer-director Aislinn Clarke’s sophomore film traverses all manners of.

The roots of Ireland’s collective historical trauma around the Magdalene Laundries — asylums that operated for more than two centuries confining disenfranchised women in the most oppressive of conditions.

The roots of matrilineal, intergenerational violence.

The roots of birth, death and everything between in a state where folklore, superstition and myth intermingle with the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church.

The largely Irish-language film, featuring almost exclusively women, opens with two supremely unnerving scenes. In 1973, Peig (Grace Collender) is abducted from her own wedding, with her newlywed finding her ring abandoned on the ground and nothing else. Decades later in the present, an older woman’s body is discovered, weeks after dying, by emergency service workers.

Siubhán or ‘Shoo’ (Clare Monnelly, Small Things Like These) arrives at the home of her estranged dead mother with her bright-eyed, pregnant Ukrainian fiancée Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) to clean up the detritus of her life. Shoo eyes her mother’s possessions dispassionately before somewhat audaciously leaving Mila to deal with the mess — Shoo’s a live-in care worker in training who’s been dispatched to a remote Irish village to look after the very same Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain, The Banshees of Inisherin) of the first scene, a now elderly woman ailing in the aftermath of a stroke and terrified of being visited by an undefined “them”.

Thorny and recalcitrant, Peig has been diagnosed with paranoia, delusions and confusion, but the longer Shoo lives in the house and is intruded upon by apparitions of her dead mother, the more she begins to believe Peig when she says “they” are out to get her — to get them both.

Fréwaka has all the classic tropes of a horror film. A sprawling, dilapidated house spread across two levels with a staircase utilised for maximum creepiness? Tick. Warnings from the local townsfolk to steer clear of said house, even as they themselves exude an unsettling otherworldliness? Tick. An absence of phone service? Tick.

Fréwaka is less of a jump-scare film, and more one focused on the messiness of life — both in its living and the aftermath of death. Two scenes are so visceral you can almost smell the stink being depicted: Shoo gingerly opening a fridge containing the rotting remnants of her mother’s life, and her chancing upon putrid broken milk bottles strewn across the entrance of Peig’s house. Irish performance artist Die Hexen’s score is startlingly piercing as it ratchets up to various apexes throughout, creating a sense of unease even when it’s blindingly light outside.

Cinematographer Narayan Van Maele is intent on capturing characters in extreme close-ups, the action unfolding beneath or behind them blurred out as we’re treated to the minutiae of their worries, hopes and desires. Similarly, the horror evoked by Clarke is highly personal even as it radiates to conjure something more all-encompassing.

Religious iconography is rife and utilised to great effect; one of the most beautifully haunting scenes sees the motif of a red cross reflected in Shoo’s wide irises. In the Ireland of Clarke’s construction where the Catholic Church casts a pall over everything, religion is a source of discontent, not a salve — a glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary and a looming portrait of Jesus seem more like portents of danger than redemption. When Shoo is haunted by her mother, it’s religious verses she first hears — a reminder of moments of intense abuse.

Irish fairy folklore is conjured to terrifying effect, as are menacing figures in medieval-looking straw masks — a sinister twist on festive ‘mummers’ — creepy goats a la The Witch’s Black Phillip, and demonic figures trying to trespass the boundaries of a home similar to a vampire.

The film is — at times very blatantly — a message that a continuing cycle of intergenerational trauma can only be confronted head-on.

But Fréwaka’s skilful, slow reveals — as we piece together the broader story of Peig and Shoo — are masterfully done.

Peig’s brittleness belies her emotional tenacity, while Shoo’s quiet intensity, affected air of nonchalance and barely concealed anxiety call to mind the likes of Charlotte Gainsbourg. The slowly building rapport between the two as they manoeuvre their new-found dynamic is a joy to watch, particularly in their shared moments of levity that offset an otherwise heavy film.

Catholic guilt, both on a personal and collective level, has found its eerie manifestation in Fréwaka — a film centred on the inheritance of Irish women’s pain and suffering at the hands of the Church that bleeds into the present and lingers.

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