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| Frewaka Photo: Courtesy of Locarno Film Festival |
The opening night film of this year’s Belfast Film Festival, and already a hit with audiences in Locarno and London Aislinn Clarke’s supernaturally themed Irish language chiller Fréwaka takes a bold and yet wonderfully nuanced look at Ireland’s history. Its curious title comes from the Irish fréamhacha, or roots, and it mingles ancient lore with historical concerns around occupation, religion, child abuse, the state-sanctioned abuse of women, and the generational trauma tangled up with these things. All this is woven into the story of care worker Shoo (Clare Monnelly), who is dispatched to help the elderly Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain) as she recovers from a stroke, and who finds herself taking on much more than she bargained for.
“Damian McCann is a director here in Belfast, and he had asked me to write a film for him. I think it was in 2018,” Aislinn tells me when we meet. “So it was an Irish language film called Doineann which went out on the BBC in 2020 or 2021. That's the only time I've ever written a film for anybody else. Then the producer of that film, Diarmuid Lavery, who's also a producer on Fréwaka, asked me if I would think about doing an Irish language horror film. I was raised with the Irish language. I was completely educated in Irish the whole way up. You know, we did everything in Irish, even P.E., even English – everything was in Irish. And also I was raised with horror films.
“Those were two major factors in my life as a child, and somehow I'd never thought about putting the two things together. So then I thought about it and I wanted to have a reason to do it. It needed to be a story that felt like it needed to be in Irish rather than just any other idea I had. So that's how it started. It's just my lens on Ireland, on Irishness, where we are now, what we're still carrying around. That's what it felt like it needed to be.”
There's an awful lot of ancient lore very efficiently packed into the film near the start. Was it a product of research, or something that she grew up with?
“The school that I went to, that was all Irish,” she says, comparing it, with some humour, to today’s ‘proper’ schools. “Not that there was anything wrong with my school, but I mean, we had prefabs, you know? A bunch of hippies wanted to be able to educate children in their language, so it had that vibe. They were very New Age, so they were really into the old ways and the myths and legends of Ireland and the folklore and oral history and stuff like that. Our teachers would listen to Enya all day long, so this was just what I was immersed in.
“Those stories terrified me as a child because the faerie folk, it's like they hate us, they wanted to punish us, and I just really didn't know why. What did we do to them? I spent probably years all put together, in my life, trying to figure it out, but I think basically the Na Sidhe are like a projection that we've created. So the Irish obviously have very high levels of substance abuse, alcoholism, self harm, suicide, generational trauma. We've had a lot of historical traumas piled one on top of the other. And I think that we created the Na Sidhe as a sort of a supernatural and powerful version of ourselves, like something that we colonised. So they were here before us, they belong, the land belongs to them. They resent everything that we do.
“We invented a version of ourselves that wanted to punish us. It's like an act of self harm. I suppose that was the primary thing that I remembered from all of those stories, that's the essential core of what I remembered. And then in terms of the accuracy of the folklore and everything, I always give the proviso when I'm asked about that that if there's some academic of folklore out there and if they say, ‘Well, this isn't quite correct,’ I really don't care, because historically these stories were shared through oral history, and one of the beauties of that is that every teller has their own little spin. So it picks up things along the way, like a snowball. I think that's part of it and I think you should have your own take. So I didn't consult the big old rubber stamp of Irish folklore. I took what I remembered from my childhood, the essence of what had stayed with me, and that's what I put in there.”
A lot of that's women's history, isn't it? I note that women traditionally passed on those stories and there's a lot of women's power in how the stories are told.
“Absolutely, yeah, I think you're right about that. Yeah. It was very often women that were handing these stories down, to children especially.”
I mention that I love how much detail is there in the set decoration and how much that tells us about those stories and beliefs.
“Yeah, well, there's two things at play there. That location that we got was a really amazing place. The family was a dad in his early 90s and his son, who's probably about 50, and they still live there. And it had never been shot in before, which very rare in Ireland. There's an interesting old house, somebody’s going to have shot in it – and I wanted somewhere that hadn't been seen. I didn't want you to feel like it was familiar. So they agreed to let us shoot there, which was probably mad on their part because I think having a film crew in your house is probably really hard going. But the house itself had so much texture and it had just a lot of stuff, you know.
“Then there's our art. Our head of art was Nicola Moroney, who was also art department on Kneecap and on Derry Girls. Nicola's brilliant, really brilliant. And I think one of the brilliant things about her is that she works with what's there as well. Rather than coming in with a fixed sense of what I'm going to do in my set design, it's like, ‘Well, this works, so let's make that work,’ you know?
“There were some rooms where we completely took them over and even wallpapered. And then there were some, like the attic and the sequence towards the end where we really didn't do that much. We moved things around a little bit, but a lot of that weird stuff was already in there, and the way things were piled up and all that was already how it was. And we were able to make use of the texture of the house, which is really settling into itself after a couple of hundred years. I think we brought in most of the taxidermy, especially the albatross in the front hall. There's a big albatross in a glass case. I think of that one as being Peig, you know? She's locked in her glass cage. And then it was almost like a marriage where when you try to divorce, y can't remember who owns what. In the attic there was a brilliant pair of callipers and there was an antique prosthetic leg. I don't remember if those were ours or if those were theirs. I could believe either. That house, it was just made for us.”
We're able to take in all of that in partly because she has the confidence to go slowly. It helps to make the film creepy. I tell her that, for me, that was also related to the fact that sometimes there is just have silence, which is also a very effective tool that directors tend to be afraid of using.
“Yeah, I think that's a really interesting observation. And I do think that space is a really neglected element of – not so much the choreography, but kind of the balance of horror, for want of a better word. It's like you're holding your breath before you scream. That's the bit where the horror is, because the scream is actually the relief, you know, so when something jumps out, you laugh. There’s the anticipation and when it's finally broken, that's actually not horrifying, that's relieving. So it's this space in between where the horror resides, I think.
“The same is true for score. There's a lot of heavy score in this and it's a real beast of a score, but I think knowing when to just take it away as well, it's about balance, about the kind of push and pull of the thing. The primary thing that I feel about horror is that it's in all of the space in between the actual scares rather than those moments themselves.”
I tell her that, as a disabled person who depends on care, I related very much to what Peig is going through in the story. All her life she’s been very focused on keeping control in order to feel safe, and that's gradually getting taken away from her. When she talks about the fear of dying, she also seems to be talking about that fear of gradually losing autonomy. With that in mind, I found it really interesting the way that the film parallels social workers with the Na Sidhe.
“Yeah. Peig, I think you really have her there, very much. She has always taken care of herself, and then she has this vulnerability now that she really doesn't want to have, to feel vulnerable. And that's very uncomfortable for her. But the social workers and the Na Sidhe thing, it's sort of alluded to elsewhere as well, there's this thing in Ireland about – well, I feel that there's a sort of a bureaucracy to the Sidhe. There's like a bureaucratic element. So there's a point when Peig talks about births, deaths, marriages. In Ireland, it's what we call the office where you go to sign your birth certificates and get your marriage certificate and your death certificates, and we just call it ‘births deaths marriages’. And because the Na Sidhe do lurk around those times as well, it feels like they're connected.
“I've always connected them in my head, in childhood. And because the Na Sidhe have so many arbitrary rules, all of these rules that are like, for the sake of having rules. Personally I hate bureaucracy, I get so frustrated. It's the long way of doing things, and for what reason? But I find that idea of them kind of charming as well, that they're all these malevolent things, but they're also weirdly kind of petty. There's so many rules that you can break that to get in trouble with these guys, like, why are they so petty when they have all this power?”
But you can also use those rules against them a bit, I point out. There’s a lovely part early on where Peig scatters seeds on the floor, presumably assuming that if the person who has come into her home is one of the Na Sidhe, she’ll have to stop to count them..
“Yeah, they have to organise things. The other thing then that links with this whole idea of bureaucracy is that the film is largely also about, as I say, the Magdalenes in Ireland. You know, the Ireland of today was formed after the 1916 Rising and we had the partition, we had the new Republic. And instantly what happened – you know, when you talk about women's history and everything – what happened is there was a big, massive slap down on women. The state was very confident, instantly, and being very bureaucratic and very suppressive, and in the new constitution, women were literally written back into the kitchen.
“My great grandmother had ridden her bike through the night as a crucial part of the Rising, to deliver important papers. She never actually told any of us about that. We found out about it through history because it was so frowned upon for women to have done things like that. So all these women played a part but they were suppressed and written out and airbrushed out of photos. So I associate that malevolent element with also the state, which is, again, bureaucracy.”
The film has a strong sense of the way that abuse within families is transmitted through generations, but also a sense of how the harm that was done to people by the Magdalene laundries, and so on, then harms the next generation as well as the one directly affected.
“Yes, absolutely. I think it does. And I think there is actually a lot of scientific evidence for that nowadays. There was a study done about the physiological effects on Irish people whose ancestors had lived through the famine, and that they still have remnants of this, like, it's literally in our bones. So I think you do pass things on, both in terms of nurture, how you raise your children, the fears and anxieties you have, whatever hangings on you have from your own childhood, and then also just that thing that we really can't control, which is whatever is in our DNA.”
There's also a hint of hereditable mental illness in the film, which I find interesting because that's something that's been heavily politicised as well, in terms of who gets described as mentally ill, and also because of the way that mental illness can develop as a result of abuse of various kinds.
“Yeah, I think it fits in a few different ways, because first of all, we've got big problems in Ireland with mental health issues. There Is, on the one hand, the reality – at least as I understand the current science understands it – that if you have, say, a schizophrenic mother, you've got a higher chance of being schizophrenic. It does have a genetic link in some way. But then how do you differentiate between that and then being raised by someone who is troubled? Troubled people create troubled people.
“Then there’s religion, which obviously is a massive part of life. If you're not Catholic, you are actually – you know, it just doesn't matter. If you're Irish, you're still Catholic. It's really hard to get away from. I was troubled by that in my childhood too, because I had an uncle that had mental health issues. And I was thinking, what's the difference between these rituals that someone who has mental health issues does, say with obsessive compulsive disorder, and these rituals that my grandmother and her friends do where they push their fist against their chest and repeat ‘I have suffered, I have suffered.’?
“To me, it felt like the same thing. It's giving yourself comfort through an organised kind of routine.”
We discuss the relationship between Peig and Shoo.
“The experience there is like a crucible for both of them, “she says. “You know, Shoo represents, in some ways, the modern Ireland. She's from the city, she mostly speaks English, she's in a same sex relationship, and her girlfriend is an immigrant as well. She's got all these different elements of what you might find in Dublin today. Whereas Peig, at least at the beginning, to Shoo, she represents the old Ireland. She lives very rurally, in the country. She speaks only Irish. She's very fixated on old rituals and superstitions and stuff like that. So it's like the two things are pushed together and then there's this like trial by fire for the rest of the film.
“I think that the thing about them is that they actually are very similar. Even though they seem extremely different, they're not that different. And it's in those little moments where one will make the other smile, but it'll be something cheeky, something mischievous, something like a little bit off kilter that they see in each other and that makes them gradually warm. You know, if Peig had been nice rather than saying ‘Who said I should be nice?’ she might have liked her as much as she did, because they're kind of the same person in some ways.”
So how does she feel, now, about opening the Belfast Film Festival?
“When you make a film, first of all you're just in your head, writing and everything, and then it's the whole shoot and that's its own mad universe. And then when it comes to having people see it in the world for the first time, you suddenly think, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this is another. What if everybody hates it?’
“The first time it was seen by the public, not by people involved, was in Locarno in Switzerland earlier in this year. And somebody had just told me like earlier on that day about a film that had shown and people walked out and all the press pulled their appointments for interviews, and everybody hated it. And I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ because that can happen. You know, you don't know how people will react to anything. But it was a very warm reaction actually. Thank goodness.
“Since then it's played in a whole bunch of places and wherever I've been with it's been a really nice reception. But that's a totally different thing to bringing it home. This is the Irish première, and it's the first time that Irish people have seen it. I'm excited for them to see it, and loads of people I know will be there and all that, but there's also just the feeling of presenting something to the people who are from the place and then going ‘This is what I think.’ It has its own kind of nervous energy.”
Fréwaka feels like part of a movement, I venture. To my mind, Ireland is currently the best place in the world for horror.
“We've had a great number of years for horror films,” she agrees. “I actually remember, even as a child, thinking ‘Why are there no Irish horror films?’ I mean, Rawhead Rex would have existed, but I hadn't heard of it. Because we are so naturally inclined to darkness, and we do have so much baggage. We have so much pain and everything that we're desperate to expunge, frankly. And while the public face of the Irish is good craic, the private face of the Irish is carrying a lot of pain. I think Irish people know that about themselves and as a collective as well.
“So I think the only reason that we haven't made horror films before now, at this kind of level, is because we didn't have the infrastructure or the money to do it. There was a lot of stuff that happened, like, say, Game Of Thrones being filmed in Ireland for 10 years, actually completely regenerated us. It changed everything. Because when I was a student here, there was absolutely nothing happening. There weren't any crew that lived here, so the best that you could do was get a camera and do it yourself, which I did do. I used to make Super 8 films and stuff. But after Game Of Thrones, these people had regular work, so they could also work in your short film.
“We've had so much more inward investment like that in Ireland in the past 15 or 20 years that has made it possible for people like Kate Dolan to make shorts and then eventually make features, or myself as well and Lorcan Finnegan and others, you know, so I think we probably would have always done. We just didn't have the access or the resources. But the Irish have always want to entertain people and always wanted to lean to darkness and have spooky stories. This is natural, I think, for the Irish.”
