There are a couple of mysterious proverbs – at least they seem to be proverbs – at the beginning of All You Need is Death. ‘Love is a knife with a blade for a handle’; ‘Love goes in at the eye’. Taken together with the version of a certain Beatles track used for the title, and there we have it, one of the film’s themes: love as something toxic, love as pain. But the police interview which forms the opening scenes of the film, as a musician recounts a recent experience with a visitor, also establishes that music itself is key here. A young woman, Anna (Simone Collins) was caught recording folk songs being performed; CCTV in the pub captured a scuffle which broke out as a result, an event which is initially woven into the film itself. As the film dispenses with this framing device, becoming a more conventional narrative, we work out that Anna actually knows the disgruntled stranger – it’s her boyfriend, Aleks (Charlie Maher) and the whole scrap was just some convoluted means of getting more information on the songs.
Is folk music so desirable? So important? It would seem so, and it’s an especially difficult world to navigate without insider knowledge. Aleks is a foreigner and Anna, although Irish and conversant in Irish Gaelic, another important signifier, is from Dublin, so she’s quite unfamiliar with the rural Ireland they need to explore. Theirs is a race to capture and keep songs which are going extinct by the day: unless they are written down and preserved, then they’re gone forever, which makes them both potentially lucrative and historically important; there are others like them too, particularly folklorist Agnes (Catherine Siggins) who runs strange, secretive seminars where she gives advice, and it’s hard not to see some of the film’s occasional moments of dark humour at play here: niche coaching sessions for intrepid ethnographers. Anna and Aleks potentially get ahead of this game when they hear of an old woman living locally who can sing a vast retinue of ‘the old songs’; when they track her down, however, they find that Agnes has already acted on their information and beaten them to it. All three of them therefore arrive at the house of Rita Concannon (Olwen Fouéré), at first facing down the woman’s deep suspicion. There’s one song in particular which Rita expected to die with her, as she has no daughter to teach; so here we are, a daughterless woman and a motherless girl, seeking a song which has an ancient, tragic history. Rita finally agrees to sing it, provided that Anna agrees not to record it.
Promises are never precisely kept in films of this nature, and at its heart All You Need is Death is another rendering of a well-known cautionary tale: an outsider who reneges on vows or breaks rules, wittingly or unwittingly, and can expect to face the consequences. Perhaps ultimately All You Need is Death cannot sustain all of the elements it clearly wants to explore, and little wonder; it tries to do so much, linking magic, music, matriarchy and meaning, exploring the roles of language, knowledge and storytelling. But it raises so many interesting ideas that the film is definitely worthwhile, even though it uses a risky circular structure, starting out with a throwaway line which promises grisly horror to come, forewarning us that we will find ourselves back at this point again, police interview and all. So we know where we’re going: what comes in the meantime is nonetheless thought-provoking and engaging, even if the film crams pretty much all of its big questions and ideas into the first third of its runtime. The stage it sets is incredibly intricate.
In its use of music, All You Need is Death suggests a novel set of ideas whereby outsiders – collectors – take a strange, proprietorial attitude to folk songs, and by extension, to the culture which enfolds them. The songs themselves become saleable, desirable artefacts, even when their meaning is lost or obscured. More than that, though, music acts like a kind of portal in the film – not in an Evil Dead way, and not quite like The Shout, either. It’s not simply singing or even hearing the mysterious Concannon song which generates harm, but the more complex ways it leads to life imitating art imitating life, as it draws upon a horrific history and spreads something of this history in the meagre present. The history may be threatening – very much so – but it’s represented as the only hope for finding real meaning of any kind, which justifies at least in part the risks people are prepared to take in order to somehow own it. As Agnes puts it, ‘the future has been picked clean’; the past prevails. The word ‘alchemy’ is mentioned in the film, too, and it’s a good fit: this secretive, specialist, quasi-mystical practice promising both knowledge and wealth sums up what these people are trying to do, whilst the clobbering weight of Rita’s song embodies the great risks at play. And, at the heart of it all is language: a fascination, a hurdle, a riddle and a literal shibboleth.
If the sometimes smudgy estrangement, body horror and retribution plot points work less well than this extraordinary opening third suggests they might – with the script even resorting to explanations in the closing scenes, suggesting some lack of confidence that the audience are getting all of this – then the film still works overall. It’s an ambitious brand of folk horror in an increasingly crowded, and often now rather samey, field: it has interesting things to say, and in the dark, sparse, claustrophobic version of rural Ireland it offers, it conjures something intense, complex and provocative, with plenty to ponder.
All You Need is Death (2023) will be released on April 19th, 2024.