Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.02: Fréwaka

Every year when I write stuff from the festival up, I feel like I should be prefacing reviews with "I don't grade on a curve and a lot of what you see at an Underground festival is going to be kind of rough", or that for as much as I like the people and energy of the festival, a lot of this isn't exactly my thing.

Which is why I only saw one movie on Thursday, even though I probably could have done three. I've never seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and don't have nearly enough interest to see a movie about it (it's a blind spot, but I'm not particularly ashamed of my horror blind spots). At the other end of the night, sure, there are good reasons to start a movie at 10:30pm when I've got work then next day, but I'm going to need more convincing than I got that a new film from the makers of Relaxer is one of them.

What's that leave us with? Weird Irish stuff. And while I like weird Irish stuff more than most supernatural horror, well…


Fréwaka

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it

I like Irish folk horror more than most other ways for movies to be built around the supernatural, but I'll readily admit: I do maybe need my hand held a little bit. The English or American boyfriend that gets laughed at before his girlfriend explains the town's traditions exists in order to make not just international audiences in general but me, specifically, a little more able to digest the movie a little better. Fréwaka, on the other hand, is mostly shot in Irish, very much intended for a local audience that knows what's going on, so maybe there's a bit more work for the viewer to get to the decent story behind it.

It opens with two prologues: A young woman vanishing on her wedding day in 1973, and a middle-aged woman hanging herself in a cramped compartment in the present day, fifty-odd years later. Soon we're introduced to "Shoo" (Clare Monnelly), the second woman's daughter, and her pregnant Ukrainian bride-to-be Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya), as they come to clean her apartment, with Mila wanting to sort the ephemera carefully while Shoo is inclined to throw it away. Mila will soon be doing that on her own, as Shoo, a home-care nurse, has just been given a placement for a stroke victim who must be an Irish speaker. Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) lives in a large, foreboding house on the outskirts of a small town. She, it turns out, was the lady at the start, and what she experienced when missing has left her agoraphobic and paranoid ever since.

I like a lot of the material that writer/director Aislinn Clarke is working with here - the eerie imagery, the two women who have survived some sort of abuse and shut a lot out as a result, the Irish brusqueness that can stop a film from woolgathering and provides a quick laugh as folks get on with it. Clarke is careful not to present anything that can't be folks in small towns doing weird local rituals until very late in the game indeed, but there's a sort of logic to how the idea of Na Sídhe is presented. Peig describes a house under her house and the idea that the world is thin around the time of major life changes, and her memories of the other side are vague and metaphoric, like the human mind can't record it properly. Clarke's script lets Shoo come at Peig's fears of the supernatural skeptically but not condescendingly, talking about how counting objects and using symbols is how humans keep control of the world around them.

The two leads are strong as well; both Clare Monnelly and Bríd Ní Neachtain find individual ways to make their characters haunted and abrasive rather than serving as too-obvious mirrors of one another. They still spar even once they understand one another, though there's more sad self-awareness of what they have in common. The rest of the cast fills their roles in solid fashion, with Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya giving Mila some frustrated depth, and Olga Wehrly doing a terrific job of convincing the audience that there may indeed be something supernatural going on just by acting weird in a couple of scenes.

The movie kind of needs what Wehrly delivers at that point because it's never quite as scary as it maybe should be if you're not primed by knowing the mythology. It sort of trucks along as decent drama but seldom quite connects with the sweet spot where the supernatural and grounded expanding intersect. Whenever something eerie happens, one is as likely to shrug it off with a thought about how this might be an unreliable narrator situation, but that's quite understandable, given what this particular woman has gone through. Bits are good and well-staged, but seem to be treading water until the last act, when the sense of reality finally begins to shake.

And even then, it ends on final scenes that have me thinking okay, I guess, if you say so, Ireland: A striking image that certainly looks the Irish folk horror part, but doesn't exactly feel like the culmination of this particular story. I suspect it may work better if you know the material, and nothing wrong like that. It's an Irish movie for an Irish audience, and well-done enough that I expect it works really well for them.