AN TAIBHSE (THE GHOST)
Writer/director John Farrelly’s excellent Irish chiller An Taibhse (The Ghost; 2024) — the first horror film in the Irish language — has echoes of The Shining and classic haunted house stories in its tale of Éamon Finegan (Tom Kerrisk) and his daughter Máire (Livvy Hill), who have been hired on as maintenance workers for a large mansion in need of repair. The proceedings take place during a great famine in the winter of 1852, and the pair will be the only people there for most of the winter. Máire believes that a ghost haunted her at their previous home, and it seems that it has either followed her or that she has new specters with which to deal. Éamon injures himself and turns to the bottle, becoming increasingly unhinged. Coollattin House, County Wicklow, which has been uninhabited for 25 years, makes for a superbly eerie setting, and cinematographers Farrelly and Ross Power maximize the atmosphere of the building and its surroundings wonderfully. A two-hander for the most part, An Taibhse boasts superb performances from Hill and Kerrisk, with a solid supporting turn from Anthony Murphy as the property’s land steward. Farrelly builds suspense in quintessential ghost story fashion, leading to a mind-boggling, eye-popping climax. If you think there’s nothing creepy anymore about characters living in the past wandering through a dark, cold house in disrepair by candlelight, the dread-drenched An Taibhse is here to prove you wrong.
BROKEN BIRD
Sybil (Rebecca Calder), the main character of director Joanne Mitchell’s Broken Bird (U.K., 2024) is an assistant undertaker who favors the fashion of silent movie stars and both presents and provokes at open mic poetry readings. When her romantic interest in museum worker Mark (Jay Taylor) hits a snag, her already fragile psychological state worsens. Also of great importance are the subplots involving grieving, often drunk police officer Emma (Sacharissa Claxton), whose child has gone missing, and funeral home owner James Fleet, who mysteriously keeps one of the business’s cold rooms locked up from Sybil. Calder gives an outstanding, nuanced performance as a highly disturbed individual who finds the dead better comfort than the living. Mitchell — who also wrote the screenplay, with Dominic Brunt and Tracey Sheals receiving “story by” credits — unveils the secrets and mysteries of Broken Bird in path-of-breadcrumbs style, building toward a truly macabre set piece for the finale. It’s a terrific feature film debut for Mitchell, who helms with aplomb.
Broken Bird opened this year’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest and will be coming to UK cinemas 30th August.
An Taibhse and Broken Bird screened as part of Pigeon Shrine FrightFest, which ran from August 22–26, 2024 in London, U.K. For more information, visit https://frightfest.co.uk/.
