Crew
Director/Screenplay – Liam Gavin, Producers – David Collins, Tim Dennison & Cormac Fox, Photography – Cathal Watters, Music – Ray Harman, Visual Effects Supervisor – Declan Boyle, Special Effects – Dennison & Walsh Film Effects, Creature Design – Bowsie Workshop, Makeup Design – Julie-Ann Ryan, Production Design – Conor Dennison. Production Company – Samson Films/Tall Man Films/Bord Scannán na hÉireann (The Irish Film Board)/Ffilm Cymru Wales.
Cast
Catherine Walker (Sophia Howard), Steve Oram (Joseph Solomon), Susan Loughnane (Victoria), Mark Huberman (Neil Hughes)
Plot
Sophia rents a large house in the remote countryside. She then meets with the occultist Joseph Solomon, saying she wants to contact someone she loves. He walks out but she pleads that it is her dead son that she wants to contact. Joseph agrees and moves in, placing a salt circle around the house, saying they are not allowed to move outside of that until the ritual is completed. He places Sophia on a punishing schedule of meditation, dietary restriction and sleep deprivation, all to prepare her for the ritual. After they progress through the levels, they will be able to summon an angel and ask it their wish. However, Sophia starts to become frustrated when the ritual drags on for weeks and nothing happens.
The Irish horror scene has been producing some impressive independent films throughout the 2010s and 20s. See the likes of Outcast (2010), Citadel (2012), The Cured (2017), The Hole in the Ground (2019), Sea Fever (2019), You Are Not My Mother (2021), The Cellar (2022), All You Need is Death (2023) and Oddity (2024), among others. (For a more detailed listing see Irish Cinema). A Dark Song was a directorial debut for Liam Gavin, who subsequently went on to direct two episodes of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020).
A Dark Song starts with a fascinating low-key set-up – the renting of a house in the picturesque countryside and then the introduction of Steve Oram. There are a series of cryptic exchanges where Oram asks Catherine Walker about her preparations in terms of diet, alcohol and sexual abstinence and of only eating between dusk and dawn, all before he refuses the assignment and asks to be paid and dropped back at the station. Or cryptic lines like “I was told it was based on the kabala” which gets the response from Oram “The kabala’s an exploration of God. We’re doing something much darker.” It’s a terrific opening to the film.
We have become used to Hollywood depictions of The Occult and Black Magic. A Dark Song strikes because it feels that someone is putting real occult rituals on the screen for the first time, leaving all the cliché hooded robes, Latin chants and sacrificial virgins well behind. It is a world of deprivations, meditations, purification rites, arcane chalked symbols and altered states of consciousness. It gives the impression that Liam Gavin has gone away and researched the real article.
Steve Oram brings quite a presence to the film – he is alternately coarse, blunt and harshly domineering. In fact, I would have to say this is the finest performance I have seen Oram give to date. Things become increasingly more extreme as Oram is demanding that Catherine Walker spend two days in the chalk triangle without food meditating about a stone, tosses buckets of water over her for sleeping in or not concentrating, that she drink a glass of his blood, that she strip off in an uncomfortably nasty scene where he sits and jerks off, even making her shave his body hair. At its most extreme, Oram makes her undergo a ritual where he dunks her in a bath and then forces her head under until she drowns.
A Dark Song is a film where the dramatic structure is not the one of a classical horror film. It consists of a lot of repetitive attempts to get the ritual right, accompanied by what often seems emotional abuse from Steve Oram. At the same time, we and often Catherine Walker are not sure if anything is actually going to happen. Eventually we are rewarded by an incredibly beatific, almost hallucinatory appearance from an angel. The film also comes accompanied by a score that, in the early stages at least, is one of the most menacing and threatening soundtracks I’ve ever comes across in a horror film.
Trailer here