Who Knew an Irish Folk Song Could Be This Scary? (2024)

A song is a vessel that houses dreams and desires that are both dead and everlastingly alive, and in All You Need Is Death it’s also a curse about the most dangerous of all emotions: love. A tale of primeval retribution and eternal damnation, writer/director Paul Duane’s feature debut is saturated in sin and fury, both of which are almost as consuming as the amour that devours its protagonists. Knowing just how much to say aloud and how much to suggest through visual and aural means, this superb Irish fable feels at once modern and ancient, and hums with mystery and malice.

Like the most evocative sort of forlorn ballad, All You Need Is Death, in theaters and on VOD April 11, provides enough details to convey its point without spelling everything out in literal fashion. From pub to pub and home to home, Anna (Simone Collins) and her foreigner boyfriend Aleks (Charlie Maher) travel around the Irish countryside playing in a band as well as, more importantly, searching for individuals who know rare folk songs. They’re both historians and hoarders, and there’s something devious about their trade, given that—via a wire cagily wrapped around Anna’s left arm—they surreptitiously record these old tunes. As indicated by a nighttime transaction in a parking lot with a collector, their end goal is cash, which is why they feel compelled to steal these songs without informing their performers. And as with all businesses, there’s considerable market competition for their goods, as a subsequent gathering elucidates.

Following an incident at a bar that’s conveyed through a mixture of real-time action, surveillance camera footage, and police-interview testimonials, All You Need Is Death follows Anna and Aleks to a get-together organized and led by Agnes (Catherine Siggins), an enigmatic woman who encourages people like them to locate and stockpile these coveted compositions. Agnes’ true intentions are deliberately opaque, and yet All You Need is Death nonetheless implies that there’s something malevolently amiss about her and this mission. “Treasure lies in the past. We find beauty where others have overlooked it,” states Agnes, who claims that by turning yesterday into a tomorrow for themselves, they accomplish “a miracle. Modern alchemy.” To conjure such magic, she says to her flock, one must detect where “a rose springs up from the corpse of time’s past."

As (bad) luck would have it, Anna and Aleks discover just such a spot. During a session with an older gentleman and his greedy daughter, they hear about a woman named Rita Concannon (Olwen Fouéré) who, like her mother, is a famed singer who may have a song that only a select few have ever heard. This naturally piques the interest of the duo, who learn from a young local named Ron (Barry McKiernan) that Rita no longer does much crooning; most of her time these days is spent getting drunk and railing against her adult son Breezeblock (Nigel O’Neill), whose creepy puppets—which he uses to entertain ungrateful children—decorate her house. Upon arriving at Rita’s remote residence, they’re surprised to be greeted by Agnes, who had previously downplayed this very opportunity. Once inside, native Irishwoman Anna’s presence entices the wary Rita to emerge from her hiding spot inside a large dresser, at which point she gives them what they seek.

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With long scraggly hair and a bottle perpetually in hand, and her ramshackle abode filled with all sorts of assorted and weathered debris, Rita resembles a witch, and as she describes it, her song is “an evil spirit on the world.” In an unknown language that predates recorded history, it tells of a king, the woman who betrayed him, and the terrible punishment he doled out against her, her lover, and their child—snippets of which we see in haunting flashbacks. Since its inception, it’s been passed down from woman to woman, never written down and never performed in earshot of a man. Despite having no official name, if it did, it would be “love is a knife with a blade for a handle.” Rita’s ensuing recital resounds with dark, anguished foreboding, and while Anna heeds the elderly woman’s wishes to not record it (instead, she commits some of it to memory), Agnes does. In the aftermath of this meeting, she sets about transcribing it with the aid of Aleks, who soon falls dangerously under its spell and, consequently, breaks off all contact with Anna.

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All You Need Is Death operates in a realm between the real and the unreal, and it carries viewers along its hypnotic wavelength, unfettered by nitpicky concerns about logic and lucidity. Duane strikes an eerily nightmarish tone that gets under one’s skin, and after setting his ominous scene, he ratchets up the unholy insanity in a latter half of spectral forces and horrific mutation that speaks to Rita’s earlier comment that, in Irish, you don’t say “I love you” but, rather, “the love for you is on me.” Forming an unlikely partnership in order to identify the strange forces that are preying upon them, Anna and Breezeblock embark on a quest to locate Aleks and Agnes, who have shacked up in an abandoned office building where the latter continues to carry out her song-hunting work and the former is now bedridden. What they find is something beyond their imagination, and which the first-time writer/director shrewdly refuses to explicate until the film’s final moments, when revelation arrives via monstrous ingestion, assimilation, and transformation.

Duane’s expert framing and equally adept sense of pace and mood help cast a chilling spell, as does Fouéré’s unnerving turn as the last in a long line of keepers of secrets. All You Need Is Death steeps itself in the mysteries of art, love, and bygone tragedies, all of which reverberate through the ages. It’s about music’s capacity to beguile and corrupt, about male rage and female vengeance, and about jealousy and treachery and a hunger that brings people inextricably together while simultaneously tearing them apart. Think of it as the most sinister folk song ever sung, although in its bleak and harrowing conclusion, it also howls with the madness and ferocity of the finest heavy metal.