All You Need is Death

 Plenty of folk horror movies use folk music, but I think All You Need Is Death is the first one to be about a killer folk song. Points for originality - there was an old Twilight Zone episode that sort of did something similar, but that's a deep cut.

 That's not even the most memorable element of the movie. That'd be the underground industry writer/director Paul Duane invented for his protagonists to try and break into.

 Anna (Simone Collins) and her boyfriend Alex (Charlie Maher) track down folk songs to sell them to moneyed collectors. It's all simultaneously very grounded and hilariously heightened; Anna gets into trouble when she's discovered recording a dude singing in a bar, for example, and a later meeting to try and sell one of their recordings is treated like a backlot arms deal. The young couple even attends an illicit-seeming seminar from Agnes (Catherine Siggins), an older pro in the field giving advice to prospective folk song hunters. Late-stages capitalism ethnomusicology - if you don't love the concept, I'm sorry but we can't be friends anymore.

 The plot - and the horror elements - kick in when the kids catch wind of the golden grail of their profession: a song that's been lost to time, one that no one has heard in centuries. Of course it's obscure for a reason - it's a bizarre cursed song from ancient Celtic times described "love is a knife with a blade for a handle". Our plucky folk exploiters manage to retrieve the song, but after they leave a mysterious force kills the singer dead.

 From there the movie takes some unexpected turns as Agnes wedges herself into the proceeds and the dead singer's son (the improbably named Breezeblock, played by Nigel O'Neill) starts hunting down everyone involved.

 I can't say I'm a fan of the mid-movie twist. It leaves the story feeling pretty disjointed, and I just didn't really enjoy the second half as much as the first. But it remains interesting, and while not entirely successful, it does have some memorably batshit moments.

 It's a strange brand of horror that doesn't really seem to know what it's going for. The supernatural threat is not very cohesive: One of the deaths feels taken from a giallo movie, and then we get swirling shadow ghosts. A slow degenerative mutation into something or another brings in a little body horror, and there's even some light cannibalism. None of it's particularly scary, but it get fairly creepy, and the variety does lend it a particular kind of energy. It kept me on my toes.

 Stylistically it's all over the place. It starts out with some diegetic found footage, only to then settle on a more traditional indie horror look (I do wonder if the film was originally intended to consist entirely of Anna and Aleks's recordings). The ensuing low-key filming style suits the film well (cinematographer: Conor Rotherham), but a couple of stylistic flourishes don't do the film any favours. There's a handful of flashbacks to the events that the song describes, and I'm sorry to say they look fucking terrible - ren-faire level bullshit. There's also a sort of montage that's meant to be scary but it only made me roll my eyes. 

 Despite all of this the film works, in a sort of shambolic way, because many of the distinct elements are engaging and the film as a whole is very well written on a moment-to-moment basis. Some lovely music and great performances from Collins, Siggins and O'Neill don't hurt. And it has all the enthusiasm of someone who's saved up a hundred disparate ideas for a passion project; I liked it, and hope it's successful enough that we get to see what these people cook up next.