FRÉWAKA - Mark Reviews Movies

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

The story of Fréwaka exists somewhere between horror of the supernatural variety and the terror of living in fear from the traumas of the past. It's slightly frustrating that writer/director Aislinn Clarke seems to use that second mode as a way to amplify the first one, but that doesn't entirely negate the creepy atmosphere of this little tale about two women connected by old pains and the fact that some unnatural thing wants one or both of them.

As a result, the storytelling is a bit too vague for its own good here, as well. This is definitely a case of a movie counting on its style to overcome the shortcomings of its substance, and honestly, the movie comes quite close to accomplishing that.

For example, we get two sincerely eerie prologues here. The first is set in a rural part of Ireland in the 1970s, when a young woman's wedding reception is suddenly cut short with the appearance of a group of masked individuals. They have marched down some country road to get here, and when the bride leaves the party after feeling woozy, she's abducted.

The second prologue is set in present-day Dublin, at the apartment of a different woman. She sings an old religious hymn in Irish, sets things around the place and herself straight, and, through the reflection of a mirror, stands on something, before her fall from that height is stopped with a snap.

The story proper, however, follows Shoo (Clare Monnelly), the daughter of the woman who hanged herself in that apartment, as she must confront the mother's death. However, she does what she has done about her mother since she was old enough to get away from the woman: avoid her. The apartment is a mess of religious trinkets and art, as well as just a clutter in general, and while Shoo would be fine to just let the landlord dispose of everything in the space, her pregnant fiancée Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) doesn't understand how Shoo could be so dismissive of her own mother.

We learn the truth soon enough, which has to do with abuse and religious fanaticism, but before Shoo is willing to tell that to her fiancée, she leaves Mila in Dublin for a caretaking job she's offered at the last minute. It's out in the countryside, and it means Shoo will be leaving Mila to the task of cleaning up the dead mother's apartment and for an unknown amount of time.

The client in the country is Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), a woman who recently suffered a minor stroke and requires some basic care. She's also showing signs of dementia—paranoia, shifts in mood, other such symptoms. What that means for Shoo is that Peig doesn't trust her caretaker, won't take her medication, and apparently worries that whoever returns from any trip to the local village for groceries somehow won't be the same person who left the house.

The two women are connected, though, in ways that are gradually, considerately revealed. Both have scars from past acts of violence—Peig with scars over her back and Shoo with burns on her forearm from when she didn't say her prayers to her mother's liking. The two bond, despite the fact that and because they are so alike in personality, and this notion kind of gets at the heart of how Clarke approaches everything about this material. It's vague in terms of any real specifics, from the particulars of those pasts and the mechanics of the supernatural elements that eventually emerge, but it's quite definitive in the feelings the filmmaker tries to elicit from those ideas.

That latter part is important, since much of this is kept on a conceptual level. Take, for example, one of the key components of the mythology here: a locked door, surrounded by charms and totems and with a certain number of nails pointing toward the entryway, that leads to a darkened basement. There's someone or something down there, of course.

It raises several unanswered questions about the reason Peig lives in this particular, why the person or thing is down there in the first place, and whether the entity is real or just something like a shared delusion of two people who have experienced similar trauma. Once the shadow of the thing appears and creeps closer into view when the door is opened, those questions are mostly worth dismissing, however. The staging—distant shots of something unseen and surely dreadful approaching from around a corner and at the bottom of those stairs—and underlying implications of those scenes are unsettling enough.

The movie really does become a string of similar sequences, from dreams, nightmares, and/or visions of real or imagined horrors to a genuinely unnerving climax that uses the slow approach of music to signal some impending doom. It's more a showcase for Clarke's ability to incorporate familiar horror concepts into some broad examination of trauma and, more impressively, to build suspense from something as ordinary as shadows or the percussion of a twisted sort of marching band.

Fréwaka clearly has bigger things on its mind, especially when we learn the connection of that opening prologue to the relationship at the center of the story. While its horror-show trappings and focus don't let those ideas breathe or develop in a coherent way, the horror show itself is almost effective enough to ignore those shortcomings.

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