FRÉWAKA
Directed by Aislinn Clarke
Ireland | 103 min | 2024 | Irish, English | Folk Horror
Haunted by a personal tragedy, home care worker, Shoo, is sent to a remote village to care for an agoraphobic woman who fears the neighbours as much as she fears the Na Sídhe – sinister entities who she believes abducted her decades before. As the two develop a strangely deep connection, Shoo is consumed by the old woman’s paranoia, rituals, and superstitions, eventually confronting the horrors from her own past.
New Europe Film Sales Boards Aislinn Clarke’s Irish Folk Horror – DEADLINE article.
Credits
Director: Aislinn Clarke
Screenplay: Aislinn Clarke
Cinematography: Narayan Van Maele
Editing: John Murphy
Production Design:Nicola Moroney
Original Score: Die Hexen
Cast: Clare Monnelly, Bríd Ní Neachtain, Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya
Produced by: DoubleBand Films – Diarmuid Lavery
Co-produced by: Wildcard – Patrick O’Neill
With support of: Screen Ireland, TG4, Coimisiun na Mean
Filmed on location in Cooley Peninsula, Co.Louth, Ireland
Aislinn Clarke
Festivals & Awards
World Premiere- Locarno Film Festival 2024
press quotes
“…a feature that cracks along at a punchy pace on visceral scares aplenty, flashes of playful humour, and a delirious mish-mash of gruesome sights… “
„Taboo histories of violence against women in Ireland are excavated in Aislinn Clarke’s chilling, over-the-top Irish-language folk horror.”
The Film Verdict
”Clarke’s utilisation of eerie Irish lore and the supernatural to explore very real horror, and the lifelong lingering aftermath of a single, damning moment, is a potent and unsettling brew.”
“A dark, haunting story told with effective restraint and punctuated with moments of impish humour and genuine terror.”
“Fréwaka is a work which sweeps you away from the very first frame; an unforgiving account of traumas which can’t be overcome or even tamed without facing up to horrors of the past.”
”Aislinn Clarke is once again embracing the obscurity of genre cinema, offering up an incredibly courageous second film which is both gloomy and abnormally bright, and a one-way journey to the darker side of being human.”
Cineuropa
”An eerie female-centric addition to the genre”
”What makes Clarke’s film interesting is the matter-of-fact tone she initially takes, and the no-nonsense nature of Peig and Shoo’s interactions. The energy that builds between the pair, thanks to top notch performances from Ní Neachtain and Monnelly, recalls the likes of Natalie Erika James’s Relic and Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother, which also let their horror elements blossom from mental disarray.”
