All You Need Is Death (2023) – Horror Movie Review by Mark Walker
Written and Directed by Paul Duane
A young couple who collect rare folk ballads discover the dark side of love when they surreptitiously record and translate an ancient, taboo folk song from the deep, forgotten past.(IMDB)
**Some mild spoilers for the first act**
All You Need Is Death (AYND) follows Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) as they travel Ireland seeking out and recording old folk songs for suspicious researcher Agnes (Catherine Siggins). It appears that this is a big deal as there are a number of people working with Agnes to find new variations of old songs. Particularly ones that haven’t been recorded or even written down before. Anna and Aleks, however, are her star pupils, not reluctant to pull the odd minor con to get people to talk about often cherished and protected history.
A tip, wheedled out of a pub band’s lead singer, leads Anna and Aleks to Rita Concannon (Olwen Fouéré) a reclusive alcoholic living in a run-down old house on the outskirts of town with her odd son, Breezeblock (Nigel O’Neill).
Rita tells them of an old song that has been passed down by generations of women, but never written down and never recorded. She offers to sing it, but only if Anna doesn’t record it. However, Agnes, who mysteriously turns up at the house before Anna and Aleks, makes no such promise and covertly records Rita’s song delivered in an old language no one recognises.
“Love is a blade with a knife for a handle.”
An evocative title for a song and one that suggests you should heed the words of the woman singing it. Any song that involves a young queen being starved to the point of eating her own baby can’t be good…
From this point on things get weird for Anna and Aleks. The power of the song invites misfortune and pain into their lives and tragedy strikes all round. As Aleks disappears with Agnes, so Anna joins up with Breezeblock to try and unravel the power of the song and stop the ancient evil they may have unleashed. The ritual of sharing the song through oral tradition acted as protection against that evil, until Agnes chose to record it.
AYND is a power ballad of a movie. It starts gently, moodily and builds through 90 minutes from a brooding, cryptic mystery into a crescendo of explosive body horror. Duane skilfully negotiates this slow but constant shift in atmosphere to deliver a film that, although you think you might know where it is going, has enough twists and turns to keep you hooked to the end.
The constraints of the low budget are sometimes clear to see, and the film can be a bit ‘clunky’ in places. Some of the plot turns rely on contrivance. Such as how Breezeblock finds Anna and how they then find Aleks and Agnes but, ultimately it doesn’t matter too much. As PIXAR say, coincidences to get characters into trouble are okay, coincidences getting them out of it, not so much. AYND falls just the right side of this line. Perhaps it was down to editing/budget, who knows. But it was only mildly annoying, and nowhere near enough to make me want to turn off.
The central performances are all solid. Collins and Maher are great as the central couple and Siggins gives Agnes a sinister edge that turns to vulnerable as the shit hits the sheet music. The standouts for me though were Fouéré and O’Neill. Fouéré doesn’t get much screen time, but when she starts singing her song to Anna and Agnes, it was a true goosebumps moment. And O’Neill plays Breeze with the conviction and level of nuttiness you would expect from someone named Breezeblock! His scene with local Ron (Barry McKiernan) who pointed Anna and Aleks in Rita’s direction, is a triumph of the weird and shocking!
AYND builds to a conclusion that is both resolution for the characters but also open ended for the legends around the song. However, it doesn’t leave you feeling cheated, although maybe a bit numb. It didn’t go quite where I was expecting. But when you mess around with an old dirge about baby-eating, what DO you expect? I can see some reviews not happy with the open ending of AYND, so it may not be for everyone. But, for me, Duane’s movie is an atmospheric, low-budget horror that is definitely worth a watch. It is not without some flaws, but they are easily overlooked.
All You Need Is Death was released in cinemas from 19 April 2024
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