The very wise and famed Irish storyteller Eddie Lenihan gave these words of cautionary advice which really should have been heeded by this film’s unwary protagonists, “If they bulldoze the bush to make way for a planned highway bypass, the fairies will come. To curse the road and all who use it, to make brakes fail and cars crash, to wreak the kind of mischief fairies are famous for when they are angry, which is often.” And so sets up the premise of Corin Hardy’s tale of Irish folklore The Hallow. This debut full length feature by Hardy puts outsiders Adam and Clare Hitchens (Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic) along with baby Fin in the path of danger when they arrive at an old mill house in rural Ireland. Conservationist Adam has been sent here to explore the deep dark woods looking for signs of disease in the trees and marking them off for destruction. The very few locals are quick to warn them that their presence and actions are not going to be received well and the fae who inhabit the woods have designs upon young baby Fin and want him for their own.
It’s a very basic premise that goes down the tried and tested cabin in the woods territory ala Raimi’s seminal Evil Dead and a horde of imitators. With this it is a suitably creepy and claustrophobic experience and the folkloric aspects are enmeshed cleverly in the tale heightening the tension and feeling of malevolence. The thick woods are really rotting and this is partly down to their grizzly inhabitants who seem to coat everything with a nasty trail of blackened parasitical slime which spreads and clogs up everything from car engines to the people themselves. The back story is one that will be familiar to anyone who has read up on the folklore and indeed it treads a very similar path coincidentally to best-selling author Ben Aaronovitch’s last ‘Rivers Of London’ story ‘Foxglove Summer.’
It is down to the two principle characters to pull things off and make them work as they are pretty much, along with the baby, the only people who have any real screen time. Ben Wheatley favourite the excellent Michael Smiley pops up as a local Garda officer and there is a brief trip made into town by Adam and Fin but apart from that the family are very much left on their own to deal with the ever increasing nasty assaults on their mill house by the fairy folk. Naturally we have to eventually see what these are like in close up and the special effects done by British SFX artist John Nolan are suitably convincing reminding a fair bit of the nasties in films like Neil Marshall’s ‘The Descent.’ Irish horror films do have the habit of being quite stereotypical and if you look at Paddy Breathnach’s ‘Shrooms’ Billy O’Briens ‘Isolation’ and John Wright’s ‘Grabbers’ the notion of backwards folk and drunkards is hard to shift. Here too the locals are portrayed as a bit on the simple side but things are almost reversed as it is they that have the knowledge and it’s the folks who are well and truly out of their territory who are the stupid ones.
I admit going into this one with a bit of a blasé attitude thinking I had seen it all before (which I had) but as a home invasion premise that goes right back to Night Of The Living Dead, The Hallow ultimately succeeded through the combination of good performances, creepy settings, admirable SFX and a jump out loud sound mix. Well worth a watch The Hallow may not have you booking a nice cottage in rural Ireland for your next holiday but will leave you suitably on edge. As for director Hardy all eyes will be on him to see what he does with the remake of The Crow next time round.
Pete Woods
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