New England Premiere

Writer/director Aislinn Clarke’s Irish-language Fréwaka is a creeping, bone-deep horror film that burrows into the mind just as much as it chills the spine. Rooted in Irish folklore and the scars of generational trauma, this atmospheric nightmare follows Shoo (Clare Monnelly), a young caregiver still reeling from her mother’s death, as she’s sent to a remote village to tend to Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), an agoraphobic woman convinced that she was once taken by Na Sídhe—elusive, malevolent fairy-like beings from Celtic myth.

Shoo arrives at Peig’s crumbling home looking for space and distance from her past and present, but finds herself pulled deeper into a waking fever dream where reality is slippery and the cellar door—creaking, red, adorned with a lucky horseshoe—seems to imprison someone, or something, that should never be free. As she becomes entangled in Peig’s sprawling paranoia, the lines between myth and memory, supernatural horror and trauma, irrevocably blur in ways neither woman can escape.

With stunning cinematography and an offbeat score by avant-garde artist Die Hexen that gnaws at the nerves, Clarke’s sophomore feature conjures a modern folk horror that lingers like a half-remembered nightmare—unshakable long after the lights come up. An essential watch for fans of Relic, Saint Maud, and the slow-burning dread of Irish horror, Fréwaka is both an unsettling ghost story and a razor-sharp reckoning with the past.

– Nicole McControversy

Brattle Passes not accepted.