Fréwaka (2024)
Premise: Things are not looking up for Shoo, our protagonist: her too-obsessed-with-the-nazarene mom very very recently killed herself, she’s having to clean her mom’s old hoarder flat with her very very pregnant fiancée, and to make matters worse, for work reasons she needs to go take care of this reclusive, agoraphobic old lady who as you might have guessed lives in Lár an Áit ar Bith (Middle O’Nowhere, Ireland). The old lady is, to put it politely, not exactly welcoming. She’s obsessed with The Fair Folk, she says her house has a house under it and stuff like that is obviously crazy talk. Or… is it?!
Under 90 minutes? About fifteen minutes over, and it is a very very slow moving film on purpose.
Do they say the title? I… honestly don’t know. Most of the dialogue in the movie is in Irish and it’s one of those languages that sounds beautiful but is very hard to parse. It didn’t appear on the subtitles at least!
One sentence review: 
Okay, more: Okay, I really liked this one. It is an extremely slow burn but it is very unsettling from basically the beginning, it plays a few switcheroos with your expectations (when the movie started I was almost groaning thinking it was going to be some satanic panic thing but it’s very much not about that), it gets really weird and unnerving. It is also very smart about letting you decide if there’s more happening than the movie openly show us, specially if you’ve ever read about Magdalene laundries for example because the movie just gives you enough clues to say “wait, so maybe it’s about this, or maybe it’s not, you decide”. Very spooky, really cool visuals, and of course an extremely weird “festival” now and then. Nice!
A simple way to improve it: There’s this really weird looking ginger kid that appears now and then and always looks extremely offputting, I couldn’t get enough of him. He was like the perfect balance between “this is just a weirdo, but what a weirdo” and “this kid’s definitely going to try to kill me if i look away”.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
The film title is a phonetic spelling of the Irish Language word “fréamhach”, which means “roots”.
Oh, right. Then I can confidently say they (quickly opens the subtitles, presses control + f, nods) didn’t say the title. I’m happy we could settle that.
