With the recent international interest in Irish horror on the rise, An Taibhse joins other Irish horrors such as short film Changeling (2021) and the upcoming Fréwaka (2024) bringing the Irish language to the forefront of horror cinema.
Directed by John Farrelly and having its international premiere at this year’s FrightFest, An Taibhse portrays a father and daughter at the tail end of An Gorta Mór (The Famine), who have arrived at a landowner’s empty house to take on a caretaker role during the harsh winter months. As the cold and isolation set in, both Éamon and Máire begin to experience chilling supernatural occurrences that will shake their foundations to their core.
Created on a miniscule budget, An Taibhse seeks to explore the insidious nature of trauma within a small familial unit who have already been put under huge amounts of stress due to their environment and the economic strain that surrounds them. Both Livvy Hill as daughter Máire and Tom Kerrisk as her father Éamon strongly embody the quietly simmering desperation held by the lower classes of 1800s Ireland, relying on the mercy of the landowners, and constantly haunted by the horrors they have seen and have had to leave behind. Hill is especially commendable for her portrayal of teenager Máire, caught between childhood and adulthood, attempting to navigate her father’s increasingly erratic behaviour, whilst also being harassed by an invisible entity during the night.
Despite being set during a definitive and highly important era of Irish history, there are times during An Taibhse in which the film feels slightly uprooted from its nineteenth century context, and minute details such as costumes and props actually lift the audience out of the period setting, causing a distraction to an otherwise significant portrayal of one of the darkest times in Ireland’s past. However, what it lacks in attention to detail, the film makes up for with hordes of expertly crafted tension and atmosphere, with a heavy air of impending dread resulting in a terrifying conclusion. Wearing its horror influences on its sleeves and laden with plenty of potential as a great springboard for future forays into explorations of the dark depths of Irish culture and history, An Taibhse is a portrayal of how the ghosts of the past still haunt the present as well as future generations to come, much like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) but as Gaeilge.
3 Screams out of 5
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