Luke: There’s too much that’s familiar in this Irish-language horror film

In post-Famine Ireland, a father and daughter spend the winter months as caretakers to a remote and crumbling country house.

The father, Éamon (Tom Kerrisk), is tasked with restoring and maintaining the big house and stables, taking his orders from an unseen employer. The daughter, Máire (Livvy Hill), takes her orders from her father.

This is a job, they are not guests in the house. Máire is told she can enter some rooms but not others. The bedrooms, the library and other upstairs areas are off-limits.

All of these house rules are, of course, set-ups, rules made to be broken. As the winter goes on those locked rooms and shadowy corners reveal spooky secrets and jump scares.

Like those novelty toy cans full of coiled springy snakes, the results are expected and mostly fun. There’s still a little thrill of recognition in these tried and true mechanisms.

An Taibhse (The Ghost) has the distinction at the time of writing and release of being the first horror film in Irish.

Homegrown horror films have been on the rise in terms of both quality and quantity over the last handful of years. I can think of a number of worthwhile releases during this period, some of which I’ve reviewed here.

Of those, several were horror-comedies – Let the Wrong One In, Boys from the County Hell and Apocalypse Clown are recent examples. I think this speaks to a knowingness with the tropes and conceits of the genre.

There is a lot that’s familiar in An Taibhse: the revelations behind those locked doors and in the darkest corners of the house aren’t surprising or novel. And the long, dark winter leads Éamon to an inevitable madness.

As if by clockwork, he begins to slip away from Máire, neglecting his duties and drinking the winter away. He’s missing the typewriter, but the Jack Torrance energy is strong in Kerrisk’s performance. The axe-wielding helps to drive the homage home.

Kerrisk and Hill have good interplay. Máire, struggles to process the death of her mother, has a wide-eyed quality to her. The terror for her comes as much from discovering the world and her place in it, as it does from the supernatural happenings in the house.

Hill did not speak Irish before production began, and she read her lines phonetically at first. This adds to the naivety of her character, Máire lives somewhere between fantasy and reality, the same place that nightmares come from.

When Éamon has Máire wear her dead mother’s dress and dance with him, she goes along with it, not realising that the line between girlhood and womanhood, and, the line between daughter and wife are blurring in the swirling winter storms that batter the house and her father’s sanity.

How much of that madness was already there with Éamon? And what of the frequent intercutting of makeshift graveyards, burning buildings and demonic faces that strobe and flash throughout the film. At first, they seem fragments of the past, but as the story unfolds it seems that they are visions of the characters’ future as well.

Director John Farrelly shoots much of the action by candlelight that barely illuminates the winter darkened interiors of the house. Éamon and Máire’s faces, barely lit by the candles, blend together in the extreme close-ups that are needed to capture the actors in such low light.

Frequently, Farrelly employs dissolves and rapid intercutting of figures – when, say, an evil puppet appears, or a book that shouldn’t be opened is leafed through. The effect is overwhelming and unsettling the first couple of times.

But there’s a reliance on repetition, formally and thematically, that makes An Taibhse feel overstretched. The project began as a 6 minute short, and it’s easy to imagine that these routines and retreads of framing would make for tense viewing in a short format.

At its feature length of 1 hour 32 minutes, the samey-ness of the scares makes for monotonous viewing. Whether deliberate or accidental, the effect is the same.

There are sequences toward the end of An Taibhse that move beyond its previously established motifs.

A winding tracking shot of Máire walking through what appears to be the same hallway mirrored in a never-ending loop is particularly handsome, with the red-orange of the candle light and tight framing bringing to mind silent-movie vignetting.

The film’s final sequence too, is equal parts distressing and visually rich. Ending on such a high note does make me feel warmer about the film at that moment.

But beyond the unique aspect of An Taibhse, there’s too much that’s familiar and staid here. There is imagery worth seeing but its effect is lessened by the repetitive and cyclical nature of the frights.

As the same horrors appear again and again, attention and scarewithall wanes. And despite the shock of the final sequence it’s hard to ignore that so much of what’s come before is overstretched and undercooked.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11.34am on 26 March 2025 to reflect that the project began as a 6-minute short, not a 16-minute short.