Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Paul Duane
Starring: Olwen Fouéré, Charlie Maher, Simone Collins, Gary Whelan
Music is magic. When we listen to a song, within just three minutes
(optimum pop length) our mood and being is helplessly transformed: the
melody, rhythm and incanted lyrics a spell working a witchcraft upon body
and soul. Even actual Darwin, who had no truck with such specious
spiritualism, conceded that the origins of music are mysterious, affecting
a "sense of sublimity" which didn't square with his evolutionary thesis.
We do not need music as a matter of survival, yet nonetheless we
constantly crave and recreate its capacity to "pass us readily into
devotion": try
this chorus
and tell me that music doesn't put us in contact with the spine chilling
divine. In Paul Duane's singular indie
All You Need is Death Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks
(Charlie Maher) get it. As research students they scour the side
streets and secret histories of Dublin to track down forgotten folk songs,
aggregating them for sinister collector Agnes (Catherine Siggins).
Their deep digs for the "weirdest songs, the oldest songs, the songs
nobody has ever heard of" uncover legend of a ballad with such deadly
melodies and Gaeltacht lyrical intent that it has remained hidden, passed
down (much in the same manner as the Grimm's Kinder - und Hausmärchen was
mainly collated from female storytellers) via familial oral tradition by
matriarchal adepts. As Hot Streak advocated, music may make you lose
control, but, in the same manner as Monty Python's funniest joke in the
world (one for the kids there), to those who hear it this jingle is
jeopardous.
As part of All You Need is Death's off kilter cosmos, its underground trad-music trade scene is depicted
with the same severity as the realisation of drug rings within crime
narratives: off-the-beaten-track pub backrooms, clandestine meetings in
car parks, muscular threats from shady men (as an obsessive hoarder myself
- comics, Prince obscurities, fairy tale books - I appreciated this
hyperreal representation of the collector mentality, an accumulative
dynamic where each gained piece feels a fragment closer to assembling the
gnostic whole). Further to this, the mise-en-scene is often composed of
night-time country lanes, diegetically illuminated by the hazy scarlet of
car lights - a fringe environment.
Like Hansel and Gretel getting yet more lost in the woods, investigation
into this liminal space leads our beauteous pair to Breezeblock (Nigel O'Neill), who is a puppeteer and carer to his mysterious, Cailleach-coded mother
Rita (Olwen Fouéré), who apparently sings the song which they seek.
Congruously for a film predicated upon the sublime power of art,
iconography explicitly relates to form in
All You Need is Death. The analogue nature of recordings - sung into tape, scribbled as sheet
music - correlates to the handmade, indie urgency of this low-budget gem.
In keeping with this motif of folk-craft, we see gorgeously unsettling
marionettes hanging from the rafters of Breezeblock's cluttered house.
Their uncanny, peeled paint presences watch as Anna and Aleks turn up to
find that Agnes is already with Rita. It is part of Duane's own
storytelling sorcery that we don't realise the creeping sense of dread,
that clutch in the chest sensation of suddenly grasping that you're in
deep, until too late. Agnes' sting is a trick played not only upon our
naïve protagonists but the audience, too.
Aleks is asked to leave the room while Rita sings to Anna, who thus
becomes a carrier of the song/power/virus. At this watershed,
All You Need is Death's narrative slips into a metaphysical middle-eight of its own; time
skips like a dusty 45rpm and meaning is obscured within the static as the
film fluctuates to its own strange tempos, a hymnal of obsession and
sensuality and dark magic. We non-causally cut to tribal figures of the
past and abject imagery of glistening flesh, as if these spectres were
always at the edge of the film impatient to invade its frames.
A horror movie one off, what All You Need is Death most
reminded me of was the folk-occult novels of god Alan Garner, wherein
fatally curious characters discover strange patterns in the everyday which
coincide ultimately with ancient energies. Agnes, hugely entertaining in
her portentousness, intones that a "rose springs up from the corpse of the
past," and, like folk music itself,
All You Need is Death seems powered by an unspoken
antecedent, a shared Jungian instinct, a familiar disconcert (isn't folk
music the unofficial music of Gen X childhood?). Writing this review,
Ian Lynch's evocative score and song is once more stuck in my head
- yikes! Just like the wretched Anna and Aleks, am I too a slave to the
rhythm?
All You Need is Death is on Shudder UK/ROI now.
