By David Dent
A spectacular howl of rage fuses the slowburn nightmare of Osgood Perkins’s early films with the basic setup of The Shining in the first horror movie to be spoken entirely in Irish.
Éamon Finegan (Tom Kerrisk, absolutely terrifying) and his daughter Máire (Livvy Hill) are hired by a well-off family to look after a huge empty family house for the winter period; if they make a go of it, they’re likely to get further mansion sitting opportunities.
It’s a daunting prospect but the pair settle down to a routine which is thrown off track when Éamon puts an axe through his foot while chopping wood, rendering him incapacitated. Máire, a girl who is finding life in the rambling house tough and wishes they could return to Belfast, is forced to undertake most of the maintenance duties while Éamon sits in a chair getting drunk on the contents of the house’s cellar.
It’s Máire who encounters the spirit of the house (if indeed it is the property that’s haunted), when she finds a book in the mansion library, an area her father forbids her to enter. The force that visits the girl is violent – she covers up bruises on her arms from her father – and she tells him that “Alexander is back…” which throws Éamon into a rage, an emotional position from which he never recovers.
Filmed in natural light, snow and wintry darkness, and set in an unspecified past (although there’s a suggestion that this is a newly post famine Ireland), ‘An Taibhse’ has a slowburn quality that might put off audiences looking for easier scares. But stick with it; the earlier, uneasy scenes build quietly to a devastating conclusion, all the more impressive for Kerrisk and Hill creating all of the tension and horror between them. There may be a certain abstraction to the film’s climax, but the power of its centre remains. This is a frightening and cathartic film which never provides easy answers.
Bloody Flicks 