"For our fourth installment of our shorter, snappier review from Glasgow Film Festival, we focus on three films that played at Glasgow FrightFest. Featuring a survival thriller, a sombre ghost story fuelled by post-partum depression, and a unique Irish folk horror, there’s a real variety of styles and approaches as always.
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Saving the best for last, All You Need is Death (Paul Duane/ Ireland/ 2023/ 98 mins) is a beautifully creepy and unique folk horror that centres around a powerful, ancient folk song. Young couple Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) are ethnographers who track down rare Irish folk songs, often using dubious means to record them. On hearing of an ultra-rare song known only by one woman (Olwen Fouéré), the pair track the woman down, and persuade her to sing it. It’s a love song – of sorts – in a language older than Irish, and it awakens something primordial that does not take kindly to being recorded and translated. ‘Love is a knife/ With a blade for a handle’ indeed."
