By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Paul Duane’s All You Need Is Death is a movie that I can best describe as a big pot of stew with many ingredients that work well on their own, but slapped together into one dish sadly don’t quite coalesce.
The plot of All You Need Is Death, centers around a struggling young musician couple named Anna and Aleks ( played by Simone Collins and Charlie Mahler), who travel around Anna’s native Ireland collecting and recording ancient folk songs. The pair hear a rumour about a secretive and reclusive old woman (the fantastic Olwen Fouere) who, once they track her down passes on an ancient and terrible forbidden folk song to Anna ( which before you ask no, it isn’t that U2 album that iTunes forced everyone to download).
While Duane has a great understanding of how to build atmosphere, and alongside cinematographer, Conor Rotherham captures the beauty of the movie’s Irish locations, the acting, apart from Olwen Fouere’s performance, makes me feel like I’m watching a bad episode of Holby City where the entire cast is hopped up on tranquilisers destroying the atmosphere that Duane has strived so hard to build. This becomes an even larger problem later on when the ancient evil is revealed and it resembles an albino Saruman the White auditioning for the Blue Man group, something which all the shaky-cam and sped-up movement in the world can’t even hope to mask.
The problem with All You Need Is Death is that it has a wealth of material to explore but instead, the end result is a bland and derivative rural-horror narrative executed a million times over by far greater movies (e.g the original Wicker Man), lumbered by a confusing story which flits from found-footage and flashbacks straight to a continuous three acts without warning, wasting some beautiful cinematography and a haunting soundtrack of Ancient Irish folksongs in the process.
All You Need Is Death is in cinemas 19 April 2024.
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