2023 folk horror movie All You Need Is Death has a couple of hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is that stupid title. Fortunately, this is a largely successful film which introduces a new twist on the genre.
This fresh angle is a plot concerning collectors of old Irish folk songs. There must be money in this, as Catherine Siggins tells a handful of attendees at a seminar she’s running: “The future is picked clean. Treasure lies in the past. We find beauty where others have overlooked it.” I feel the same way about the wonders I keep finding by digging deep into obscure music of the 60’s, well past what is most widely loved.
Simone Collins and Charlie Maher are a couple who are in the business and may have an exciting lead in a field where the best most achivists hope to find is a variant on a known tune. Instead, they have been led to Olwen Fouéré, a woman who knows a song that predates the Irish language.
She explains it cannot be written down, and is only passed down orally through generations of women. Fouéré only has a son, Nigel O’Neill (as the improbably named Breezeblock) and so decides to sing it for Collins to memorize. This is after Maher has left the room, as it is not for the ears of men. But Siggins, who happens to have arrived before Collins and Maher, is also there and has surreptitiously recorded it. In one of the film’s creepiest moments, Siggins initially appeared to be sitting alone in the living room when our leads arrived, until Fouéré starts speaking from where she is hidden in the armoire.
Needless to say, there are consequences for that secret recording, though not what I was anticipating. Siggins and Maher work together on transcribing and translating the work, with him increasingly falling under a spell worked by the recording. Soon the two are getting together in the more intimate sense.
The result is he experiences a transformation I did not anticipate, nor do I seem to fully understand. I found the outcome of this development unsatisfying, and wish the film had ended on an ambiguous note about five minutes earlier than it does.
Parallel to this thread is O’Neill’s brutal pursuit of those he believed killed his mother. You see, after everybody had left the old woman’s house on that fateful night, Fouéré was hitting the bottle when it hit her back, courtesy of a dark and blurry shape that drives it straight into her mouth. When the son finds the body, the top half of the bottle has been broken off and shoved into an eye socket.
O’Neill is an odd character. When we first see him, he’s performing a puppet show for children. But he also has made the creepy sculptures that are all around the home he shares with his mother. There were a couple of aspects about that house that should have had Collins and Maher turn heel immediately, starting with it being pointed out to them as being the last house on the left, as anything remotely like the Wes Craven movie of that title should be avoided (including that movie). Never mind what we see in the foreground when they are in the foyer, a toy chainsaw suspended on a line in front of a stuffed animal of a sheep. Sheep are always, always a metaphor.
Following the trail of connections will lead O’Neill to Collins. He takes her hostage while he looks for Siggins and Maher. Collins doesn’t even have to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome, as she’s already on his side. As the scorned lover, she wants O’Neill to “use his imagination” when he finds Siggins to exact his revenge.
As somebody who enjoys folk horror, as well as some folk music from the isles, there was much I found to enjoy in All You Need Is Death, even if it doesn’t stick the landing. It has an interesting plot and characters, especially O’Neill as a man with a potential for horrific violence, but who operates by his own rigid moral code. He even has a certain innocence about him. All of this only confirms something for me: never trust a man who is a puppeteer.
Dir: Paul Duane
Starring Simone Collins, Charlie Maher, Catherine Siggins
Watched as a rental on Fandango At Home