Film Of The Week: Fréwaka

What does it mean to inherit a trauma you never asked for? In Fréwaka, writer-director Aislinn Clarke reaches deep into Ireland’s troubled soul to find an answer. What she unearths is a film that is quietly haunting, emotionally resonant, and thematically ambitious. This is a horror film that lingers in the mind for all the right reasons.

From its deeply unsettling opening - a 1970s rural wedding shattered by masked intruders, an unexplained disappearance, and an unspeakable tragedy in an Irish house - to its strikingly composed final frames, Fréwaka immediately establishes itself as a slow-burn psychological chiller that refuses to play by conventional horror rules. What emerges is a layered meditation on generational trauma, the institutional abuse of women, and the eerie persistence of the past, particularly the dark legacy of the Magdalene Laundries.

Clare Monnelly, looking like a young Charlotte Gainsbourg, gives a restrained but compelling performance as Shoo (short for Siobhán), a care worker whose cool exterior masks a reservoir of pain. After the death of her estranged, deeply religious mother, Shoo accepts a live-in care job in a remote village, looking after Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), an elderly woman whose paranoia about “them” - an undefined but oppressive force - initially seems like the ramblings of a woman in decline. But as Shoo settles into the decaying house, full of old Catholic iconography and strange noises behind a red cellar door, the film begins to blur the line between delusion and something far more sinister.

The central relationship between Shoo and Peig is the film’s emotional core, carried by two deeply felt performances. Their uneasy bond, steeped in mistrust, pain, and a shared understanding of silenced suffering, offers moments of surprising tenderness amid the dread. Ní Neachtain is particularly memorable as the sharp-tongued, eccentric Peig, veering between vulnerability and defiance with captivating ease. Conversations touching on queerness, women’s work, and religious abuse add in layers of meaning and resonance

Visually, Fréwaka is steeped in atmosphere. There’s a specificity to the details which bears appreciation, with Clarke’s focus on glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary statues and the murky bog-brown tones of 1970s interiors making the film feel accurately Irish. Narayan Van Maele’s cinematography expertly conjures tension through shadowy corridors, tight interiors, and ominous daylight exteriors, while production designer Nicola Moroney peppers the landscape with detail: ribbons on branches, scissors in jars, the flickering watchfulness of a Sacred Heart lamp. The recurring use of red - light, fabric, the dreaded door - adds a jarring pulse of menace throughout, along with Wicker Man-style imagery and re-appearing black goats. Die Hexen’s electronic score is another key player, buzzing with discord and rhythmic unease, giving even mundane moments a sense of disorientation and dread.

Fréwaka stumbles slightly in its pacing. The middle section feels drawn out, with certain beats repeating themselves and some scenes edging toward redundancy. While the slow unravelling of Shoo’s mental and emotional state is key to the narrative, a tighter edit might have amplified the tension rather than diffusing it.

That said, Clarke’s direction remains assured throughout, balancing supernatural elements with real-world horrors in a way that feels organic. The allusions to Catholic abuse, intergenerational trauma, and a cultural shame that results in silence and complicity aren’t just thematic flourishes, they are the foundation upon which the entire narrative is built. This is horror not just as entertainment, but as excavation.

Like the title it shortens - Fréamhacha (meaning “roots”) - the film is ultimately about what lies buried, in the ground and in memory. Clarke doesn't offer tidy resolutions, but she does leave space for reckoning. With Fréwaka, she continues to carve out a distinct space in the Irish horror landscape, one where ghosts are as likely to be found in history books as behind locked doors.