Unwelcome

 So you're making a movie about killer fairies. You can make a serious movie that's ashamed of being about killer fairies and explain them away with something 'serious' like, say, cordyceps, or downplay the fantastic elements. You could just embrace the silliness and bring the ridiculous to the fore. Or you could fucking own the fact that you're making a movie about killer fairies and take it seriously enough to allow it to work as a horror movie.

 Unwelcome walks that last, most difficult path, and that alone makes it worthy of respect. And then it has the stones to be a damn good killer fairies movie, too.

 Before getting to the emerald isle, there's a short prelude set in a housing estate somewhere in London. Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) has just found out she's pregnant, to her husband Jamie's (Douglas Booth) delight. It's an almost sickeningly sweet scene, like an advert for a joint bank account- right up to the point where some hoods that Jamie managed to piss off while getting Prosecco at the corner shop stage a very upsetting, violent home invasion.

 Cut to a few months later. The couple's inherited a property in the Irish countryside which comes with a few strings attached. One, it's a fixer-upper; two, the sweet old lady that welcomes Jamie and (a very pregnant) Maya to the house gets her to promise that she'll leave a bit of bloody, raw meat every night to the wee people that live in the woods out back. The red caps of Hellboy fame (Iron Shoes) actually belong to Scottish folklore, but there's a fair bit of overlap. These are pretty close to the Irish Far Darrig tales, if a bit more violent.

 Problems arise when the Whelan clan enters the picture, a bunch of ne'er do wells contracted to fix up the house. The builders from hell, led by an asshole who insists he be called 'daddy' (The great Colm Meaney), two thuggish siblings (Chris Walley and Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), and a slow-witted, physically imposing man (Kristian Nairn, kinda looking like an evil Jack Black).

 The patriarch holds his own in check, barely, but as soon as he's not there things go south pretty quickly with a slow, Straw Dogs style escalation. And then the murdergnomes arrive in full, their appetite for babies ('babbies!') well established.

 There's a lot of movie in here. The themes Mark Stay's clever, tightly-woven script works with may not be subtle or handled in the most original or particularly insightful way, but it's still a clever examination of violence and its consequences as viewed through genre trappings. Hell, just the fact that there's consistent themes at all should be celebrated. And while there's a rich, coal-black seam of humour running throughout the whole thing, it's repressed enough that it comes through as more of a perverse sense of fun that informs the film's pretty effective suspense and horror.

 Well, at least until the fairies arrive, looking like something out of a Brian Froud illustration. They're funny, expressive, and cool-looking practical effects that owe more than a little bit to Gremlins. But even when they arrive in all their giggly, stabby glory, the movie remains absolutely deadpan.

 

 Cinematographer Hamish Doyne-Ditmas makes great and frequent use of drone photography, and a lot of tinkering to make many of the scenes look slightly otherworldly. Elsewhere there's a great orchestral score from Christian Henson, a bunch of cool-looking sets, and some pretty gnarly gore. This is a pretty lavishly produced movie, at least for current genre standards.

 Your tolerance for it will depend on whether you can accept the tricky tonal tightrope-walking director Jon Wright is attempting and the amount of fantasy he allows into the picture. I thought he nailed it, but that's definitely going to be a point of contention. There are definitely some issues with pacing, some iffy dialog, and instances of the film showing its had a little too much.
 But these are all minor issues. Unwelcome's a fun, polished, nasty little slab of weirdness that punches well above its wee height.