Fréwaka

 When Shoo (Clare Monnelly) and her fiancée Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) arrive at Shoo's mother's home to clean up after her death, Mila is shocked at just how few fractions of a fuck she seems to give. Things aren't improved when Shoo decides to take a care worker gig somewhere out in the boondocks and fucks right off, leaving poor Mila to throw away all her late, unknown mother-in-law's belongings. That's no way to foster a relationship.

 Shoo of course has her reasons, which are explained later in the film. But the bulk of the story concerns her stint taking care of Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), an older woman living alone in an isolated, large house after a stroke.

 Peig, you see, is a difficult customer - she refuses to open the door for Shoo, and greets her with a puddle of piss. (that's piss!, Peig helpfully explains.) Even once Shoo gets access to the house, she has to deal with Peig's constant hostility and bizarre rituals - from throwing away all her pills and dumping a ton of salt in her porridge, to keeping all the mirrors in the house covered and making Shoo tap an iron horseshoe three times every time she wants to come in from outside.

 But as Shoo ingratiates herself to the older woman, she starts to think there may be more to her weirdness than paranoid delusions. No points for guessing that there is, indeed, a supernatural menace trying to wend its way into the house from without (and within, through the heavily warded cellar door).

 Fréwaka does what it does well. Writer/director Aislinn Clarke and her crew do wonders with a shoestring budget - I have to respect a movie that has 'monsters' that include guys in suits and Friday-the-13th-part-one-style sack-cloth masks... and succeeds in making them menacing without any violence. The filmmaking is often beautiful, with some pretty striking use of colour, and always atmospheric (cinematographer: Narayan Van Maele); A jarring soundtrack by Die Hexen helps immensely.

 This is what people call an extreme slow-burn, and the tone is unremittingly bleak, with some bursts of warmth as the relationship between the protagonists develops - both actresses are excellent.

 The story flows well, has suitably nasty reveals. Its plot, much like Clarke's previous (and better, in my opinion) movie The Devil's Doorway, hinges between Irish Catholic abuse and more pagan concerns, and it incorporates a lot of cultural and supernatural specifics, along with some cool ideas. My  favorite being that certain thresholds like marriage, birth and death acting as vectors through which the uncanny can seep in... Shoo, unfortunately, qualifies for all three). This is all good stuff.

 Despite  fulfilling several criteria, I don't think this can be accused of being elevated horror - It's certainly arthouse and built around trauma, but there's never a sense that it's only begrudgingly a horror movie. However well crafted and sincere, though, I constantly felt a certain familiarity to the film's tropes and throughline, and a distance I wasn't able to close.

 These are both things I've struggled with a handful of other modern folk horror movies, though... So maybe mine is a a problem with the subgenre? I'd hope not - I love folklore, I love horror, and I love movies that try to make faeries as scary as they were to our distant ancestors. So I'm left a bit annoyed I didn't like this movie as much as I wanted to.