Written and directed by documentary filmmaker Paul Duane, All You Need Is Death follows two underground musicologists, Anna and Aleks, as they travel the backroads of Ireland recording and collecting traditional folk songs. Things take a turn for the sinister when they hear about a woman in County Armagh who can sing them an ancient song, never recorded or transcribed, but passed down through generations of women. Sung in a language older than Irish, the song unleashes an otherworldly force and Anna and Aleks find themselves navigating a shady realm of arcane lore and forbidden knowledge.
With its tantalising premise involving the recording of ancient folk songs, and shadowy black markets in which eccentric collectors vie for the rarest recordings, All You Need Is Death is a darkly beguiling folk horror. The story unfolds in rural, backwoods pubs and small farmhouses, gradually straying into strange hinterlands and creepy urban edgelands of disused industrial spaces. The contemporaneous setting, as well as being atmospheric, highlights the striking contrast of the Old Ways existing within modern times, echoing out from history and making their presence felt in folk songs and stories, beliefs and customs still practiced behind closed doors. We are always haunted by the past in Irish horror. Duane’s experience as a documentary filmmaker imbues some of the earlier moments with a very naturalistic feel, as Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) meet with local musicians and singers in small pubs to listen to and record old folk songs, to talk about the history of the songs and their meaning. It becomes obvious that people are very protective of these songs, and that they have meaning and power and influence. They hold stories and experiences and have been shared within communities for generations, passed down orally, never recorded or shared with ‘outsiders’.
The use of musicology, and songs as keys to unlocking the past, in a Folk horror narrative, is fascinating – Duane’s screenplay taps into notions of old, forgotten ways, and groups of people dabbling in stories, songs and notions dreamt up long ago. Music has the power to transport a listener to other realms, it has the power to transform. Folk songs are stories, testimonies, artefacts of a bygone era, previous ways of life, social history, living documents that tell us of our past. It’s all really ripe material for a dark tale of the past returning to the present to cause untold chaos. And for a film about a cursed folk song, All You Need is Death features a suitably atmospheric, otherworldly score by Ian Lynch from Dublin folk band, Lankum.
Spurred on by the greedy demands of Machiavellian collectors, Anna and Aleks travel to Armagh to meet a mysterious woman, Rita Concannon (the always fabulous Olwen Fouéré), who is said to remember an ancient and powerful song – titled ‘Love is a Knife with a Blade for a Handle’ - passed down to her through her matrilineal line. An acclaimed stage actor, Fouéré has become a strong presence in horror in recent years (Sea Fever, She Will, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Mandy, Tarot, The Watchers) and here she delivers another deeply intense performance as a woman who believes her knowledge and heritage, and this song, will die with her as she has no daughter to pass it down to. She has a fraught relationship with her adult son (Nigel O’Neill, Mandrake, Boys from County Hell) who laments not inheriting the gift of the song.
The veil between reality and the Other Place becomes increasingly thin when Agnes (Catherine Siggins), a shady scholarly researcher with a specific interest in this song, follows Anna and Aleks to secretly record it and translate it. The words and their arcane meaning have great, unknowable power, and otherworldly forces begin to manifest – black moulds, an impossible pregnancy, a devastating physical transformation. Something is coming closer to the characters from somewhere they can never comprehend, somewhere not of our world. Hints of faerie magic and blood curses bloom into being. Is history being repeated? An ancient ritual re-enacted? Supernatural revenge sought for a past betrayal? Love becomes an insatiable, all-devouring thing.
A few plot-strands are left tantalisingly vague, particularly the strange subculture of elite collectors who buy and sell these recordings, sonic snippets of history and knowledge and experience, for selfish, perhaps even nefarious reasons. The interactions between Anna and Aleks and these capitalist alchemists, who appear to covet knowledge and power from the past, are quite Lynchian in their execution. While the narrative eventually becomes unfocused and muddled, Duane manages to maintain an air of intrigue and sustained otherworldly threat all the way to a fittingly strange and bleak denouement.